of course, a P100 would be allow you to run games like Tomb Raider or C&C95 more comfortably. 8MB is also quite low, and 32 or 64 would certainly make things better (dont go above 64MB though , most P5 chipsets wont work well with more)

in fact , Id go one step further and say that in a Win95 enviroment, you probably want a P133 or 166 if the board can run them

Personally I don't notice much difference between the P75 and P100. I find that the next real step are CPUs of 133-150MHz or more (depends on other hardware) but that might only be the applications and games that I want to use. Of course, you could upgrade to a faster CPU and then just underclock it anyway if you want to slow it down for some reason. My last Pentium 75 was just a Pentium 100 running on a 50MHz BUS.

32MB is more than enough for a system at this speed. If you want to go for 64MB, go ahead, but you probably won't use it.

Darkman wrote:

(dont go above 64MB though , most P5 chipsets wont work well with more)

What's wrong with running more than 64MB of RAM? I've got a P200 system (specs here) that I've been running forever with 128MB of RAM and I've never noticed any problems.

Is there a hidden performance boost or something if I reduce to 64MB? Are there problems I'm supposed to be having?

Most chipsets can't cache more than 64MB, thus accessing memory beyond that becomes a lot slower (unless using a K6+ chip, which mitigates this somewhat). Windows is specially affected by that. I don't recall DOS suffers much from it unless you actually use more memory.

OK, this got me worried so I had to check the manual for my 430HX motherboard. I found this info:

"The mainboard has an 11 bit tag built on board so cachability of main memory is to 512MB."

This explains why I've never had any problems. I wonder if other 430HX boards have a memory limitation.

Ya learn something new everyday. I'm glad you guys mentioned that 64MB limitation. Thanks! If I ever buy another old mainboard, I'll keep this in consideration.

I think the 430HX is the one Intel chipset that does not have that limitation (as long as you have the correct TAG RAM). No TAG RAM can help with the 430VX, though. I know the VIA VP2/97 can also cache at least 256MB with the correct TAG RAM, but not all boards have it.

Thanks for the help, I could just buy 4 16MB modules and see how it goes.

Any help with my newly asked questions and information?

Id say play with the FSB and multiplier settings and see if you cant get your current Pentium to run at a higher speed before bothering to buy another chip. The 64mb of ram is a good upgrade idea and what I would suggest, Win95 runs great with 64mb. Can you give us any specs on your current video/audio cards? That is always a good place to start with upgrades. If your disk check gets stuck for 10min or more I would say that your hard drive is toast and you need a new one. Maybe it has a stuck head or something and just simply cant be accessed, who knows. A CF card/adapter would be a good alternative since your system is so old it probably has a low capacity cap. I would go with a 4gb CF card just to be safe unless you find out that your bios has a larger limit. Good luck and hope we can help ya more!

Alright, the good news first: I moved the socket speed jumpers, it now runs at 100MHz! and I still have a few more options left. lets try them out.
However, do you think that the heatink is able to keep the CPU on safe heat levels? I do not want to put a massive amount of stress on the CPU.

really, REALLY BAD news next:
I tilted the HDD a bit by accident, now it makes scratching sounds when starting windows... I guess it is going to fail at a rapid rate now.

Massive bummer for me, stupid mistake, stupid me!

Running scandisk in dosmode now. WIll install norton utils soon to further check the harddrive, and try to fix some bad sectors or garbage data.

Are you using the onboard S3 graphics, or do you have another display card? If you are using the onboard one, it is possible to upgrade its RAM from 1MB to 2MB as far as I can see from your picture. For some S3 cards, 1MB to 2MB upgrade means quite a performance increase due to how they utilize their video RAM.

tayyare wrote:

Are you using the onboard S3 graphics, or do you have another display card? If you are using the onboard one, it is possible to upgrade its RAM from 1MB to 2MB as far as I can see from your picture. For some S3 cards, 1MB to 2MB upgrade means quite a performance increase due to how they utilize their video RAM.

I have a PCI ATI MACH64 8MB (I think? two hy514260b jc-60 9536a KOREA chips. two more can be socketed if I wanted to.) and a PCI S3 ViRGE/GX 4MB

I also have quite the nice AGP collection, but that is more of a P2/3 era.

T4600C wrote:

Alright, the good news first: I moved the socket speed jumpers, it now runs at 100MHz! and I still have a few more options left. […]
Show full quote

Alright, the good news first: I moved the socket speed jumpers, it now runs at 100MHz! and I still have a few more options left. lets try them out.
However, do you think that the heatink is able to keep the CPU on safe heat levels? I do not want to put a massive amount of stress on the CPU.

really, REALLY BAD news next:
I tilted the HDD a bit by accident, now it makes scratching sounds when starting windows... I guess it is going to fail at a rapid rate now.

Massive bummer for me, stupid mistake, stupid me!

Running scandisk in dosmode now. WIll install norton utils soon to further check the harddrive, and try to fix some bad sectors or garbage data.

On the heat issue my suggestion is to add a thin layer of thermal paste between the cpu and heatsink (they did not tend to do so back then) and run something cpu intensive for 20 minutes. If the heatsink is hot enough to burn your fingers after/before 20 minutes I would suggest adding a small 40mm fan to it 😀

Nice little machine! According to markings, the motherboard is made by Mitac, model PL5600G.
Jumper settings etc. - http://www.elhvb.com/mobokive/archive/Compaq/ … 2sbjumpers.html
Other links - http://www.ctechinfo.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=102

Max RAM is 128MB, which is pretty huge for that era. What is also huge is that heatsink on the CPU, massive compared to the piddly one on my 233MMX! Though I do have a noisy, slightly hopeless fan on it. So as ODWilly says, add some thermal paste and your overclock should be stable, and a fan if need be.

The drive would be about 16-17 years old now, so I wouldn't be upset with yourself about damaging it - from your earlier tests it sounds like it was on its last legs. Sourcing an older working mechanical drive is probably going to lead to more issues, so the IDE-to-CF card option sounds like a good idea. As someone said, capacity is likely to be BIOS limited.

For a white box manufacturer there was an interesting list of add-on bits for this machine, including MPEG board and wavetable upgrade - here's a list of them with pics: http://store.emprgroup.com.au/hpc-79053-6-com … 236520-001.aspx (though I doubt that most of these will be in stock)

AFAIK CF cards are better for DOS machines, but Windows just likes to do random writes to the disk and thus have lower performance on those. Search for Phil's (philscomputerlab) vídeos about storage: you can easily get a modern hard drive, limit its capacity and use a SATA/IDE adapter to put it into an older machine, with the added benefit of superior performance.

KT7AGuy wrote:

This explains why I've never had any problems. I wonder if other 430HX boards have a memory limitation.

Most HX boards need a TAG RAM installed to cache more than 64 MB, then it's no problem.

All other Intel Socket 5 and 7 chipsets (FX, VX, TX) can't cache more than 64 MB at all.

Does DOS or Win95 even support 128MB of ram?

The heatsink can get hot, the heat getting uncomfortable after 3 seconds or so. I could install a fan, but I dont think that it has a power plug on the motherboard for that, any help? maybe I can use the second floppy drive power cord?

Anyway, I fully formatted partition 2 (Parition 1 is the Compaq diag/bios partition.) and installed my official version of DOS 6.22 on it.

Now I just have to install the CD-ROM driver and PS/2 mouse driver and I am good to go with DOS.

Maybe I will add dual boot of WIn95 later, if that is possible.

Thanks for all your suggestions.

T4600C wrote:

Does DOS or Win95 even support 128MB of ram?

Windows 95 (and 98, and ME) can only access 512 MB of RAM, and may not even run correctly with more than that. (There are a lot of different stories out there on the matter.) But 128 should be fine.

There probably aren't any DOS games that can use any more than 64 MB of RAM, though you can always use extra for a RAM disk or something.

The heatsink can get hot

Yes, that is what heatsinks are supposed to do. -_-

I could install a fan, but I dont think that it has a power plug on the motherboard for that, any help? maybe I can use the second floppy drive power cord?

I've seen Socket 7 coolers that use molex connectors (i.e. the same thing that plugs into the CD-ROM and hard drives).

Maybe I will add dual boot of WIn95 later, if that is possible.

I guess that's a discussion for your other thread.

As for the CD drive, I got it to work.

However, to make file tranfers easier, I removed my Philips CCD 3610 CD/RW drive from its external parralel CD-ROM caddy and configured it in dos as an internal drive.

Now I can move files quick, easy and without wasting CD-R, which I use for my old Philips Audio-CD player.

Messed with the jumpers again, got it running at 120mhz, better to only start using this when I bought a fan though.