How did you confirm that the cache (L1/L2?) is not being used?

nforce4max wrote:

BSA Starfire wrote:

eBay seller excepted a low ball offer for a C3 1.2 GHz Nehemiah socket 370 CPU. so should have benchmarks and impressions soon-ish. The EPIA 100000 has still not arrived after 8 days despite being local 🙁

Did it even ship? Chances are that the seller either forgot or you got a scammed, be ready for the usual claim.

It finally arrived safe and sound! Will do some testing later today 😀

It's going to be very slow in Windows regardless, I'd benchmark the cache hierarchy.

The Nehemiah reports that L2 is always disabled in MSR 11Eh even if it's enabled.

Also check EAX in the 1107h FCR, bit 8 tells you whether L2 is disabled, bits 13 and 14 tell you whether L1$I and L1$D respectively are disabled. They default to 0 (caches enabled).

My socket 370 C3 1.2A came in yesterday, gave it a quick go on the ASUS CUSL2, BIOS doesn't recognize the CPU correctly, thinks Pentium II 600, wouldn't see the times 9x multiplier or allow the voltage lower than 2 volts(should be 1.45v), so I didn't even try to boot OS. Perhaps a different BIOS version may help, but I'm pretty sure when I checked a while back I'm running the latest.

Update on my situation. No dice on the Nehemiah. I guess my board did not detect it properly, so I sent the CPU back to the seller for a refund (minus restocking fee).

That is unfortunate. Also kind of opposite of my own experiences: All C3/Mobo combinations that I intended try worked out. As per my earlier VIA C3 Mainboard compatibility notes. I will try to extend my compatibility notes further, when time allows. Then, if one wants to be sure of a working C3 combination it is a matter of sticking to the tried and tested.
Though my own inventory is mostly about i440BX Slot 1 Boards + Slotkets, and not at all about native Socket 370(T) boards which I find less desirable.

I guess I'll have to wait to do anything with this CPU till I have a later tualatin/nehemiah compatible 370 board as the ASUS CUSL does have the newst BIOS. I have the EPIA 10000 to test in the next few days anyhow so no real problem, it go can into the stash till them, they are getting hard to find now.

The C3 Nehemiah I ordered came in today and it appears to be fully functional on a Gigabyte GA-6VXE7+ Rev. 3.0 motherboard. Strangely, the BIOS doesn't detect any cache in the CPU, although the computer runs too fast for the CPU to have none of its cache enabled. Sure enough, using SetMul to disable/enable cache alters performance quite considerably, which tells me the cache is enabled, but for some reason, the BIOS doesn't see it.

Hands-down, this is the most versatile of the three types of C3s I've tested (Ezra, Ezra-T, Nehemiah). My current test setup uses this:

-Gigabyte GA-6VXE7+ Rev. 3.0 Socket 370 motherboard
-128MB of PC133 RAM (will bump this up to 256MB)
-3DFX Voodoo 3 3000 AGP graphics card
-80GB Western Digital hard drive

As Gerwin mentioned, the C3 Nehemiah slows down quite far, even further than either the Ezra C3, Ezra-T C3 and even the AMD K6-III+. When the CPU is running at 266MHz (66 x 4.0) with all cache and branch prediction disabled, it runs even slower than the Ezra C3, Ezra-T C3 and K6-III+, which means this CPU should be able to run a wider variety of speed-sensitive DOS games. On the opposite end, the most stable overclock I managed to get was 1.46GHz (133 x 11.0) and while I do still need to compare the results with the other C3s and the K6-III+, it looks to me like the C3 Nehemiah is a bit faster than the K6-III+ overclocked to 600MHz (100 x 6.0).

I will do some more testing and try the CPU on an older GA-6VXE7+ Rev. 1.0 to see if the older board revision works as well. I may revise my hybrid PC (Windows/DOS all-in-1 build, which is currently running on a K6-III+) with this motherboard and the C3 Nehemiah with varying speed and cache settings on a per-game basis (the multiple FSB settings, multiplier settings and cache settings makes it easier to fine-tune speed settings on VIA CPUs, in my opinon, even though the pre-Nehemiah versions are somewhat lackluster compared to the K6-III+ when extra performance is required).

Nehemiah reports no L2 in the normal MSR for that, even when it's enabled, so that's normal for it to report none.

(And then there's the Samuel 2 that I've got, that reports 16 MiB in that MSR, when it's actually only got 64 kiB.)

Ace wrote:

The C3 Nehemiah I ordered came in today and it appears to be fully functional on a Gigabyte GA-6VXE7+ Rev. 3.0 motherboard. Str […]
Show full quote

The C3 Nehemiah I ordered came in today and it appears to be fully functional on a Gigabyte GA-6VXE7+ Rev. 3.0 motherboard. Strangely, the BIOS doesn't detect any cache in the CPU, although the computer runs too fast for the CPU to have none of its cache enabled. Sure enough, using SetMul to disable/enable cache alters performance quite considerably, which tells me the cache is enabled, but for some reason, the BIOS doesn't see it.

Hands-down, this is the most versatile of the three types of C3s I've tested (Ezra, Ezra-T, Nehemiah). My current test setup uses this:

-Gigabyte GA-6VXE7+ Rev. 3.0 Socket 370 motherboard
-128MB of PC133 RAM (will bump this up to 256MB)
-3DFX Voodoo 3 3000 AGP graphics card
-80GB Western Digital hard drive

As Gerwin mentioned, the C3 Nehemiah slows down quite far, even further than either the Ezra C3, Ezra-T C3 and even the AMD K6-III+. When the CPU is running at 266MHz (66 x 4.0) with all cache and branch prediction disabled, it runs even slower than the Ezra C3, Ezra-T C3 and K6-III+, which means this CPU should be able to run a wider variety of speed-sensitive DOS games. On the opposite end, the most stable overclock I managed to get was 1.46GHz (133 x 11.0) and while I do still need to compare the results with the other C3s and the K6-III+, it looks to me like the C3 Nehemiah is a bit faster than the K6-III+ overclocked to 600MHz (100 x 6.0).

I will do some more testing and try the CPU on an older GA-6VXE7+ Rev. 1.0 to see if the older board revision works as well. I may revise my hybrid PC (Windows/DOS all-in-1 build, which is currently running on a K6-III+) with this motherboard and the C3 Nehemiah with varying speed and cache settings on a per-game basis (the multiple FSB settings, multiplier settings and cache settings makes it easier to fine-tune speed settings on VIA CPUs, in my opinon, even though the pre-Nehemiah versions are somewhat lackluster compared to the K6-III+ when extra performance is required).

Thanks, I'll look out for one of those gigabyte motherboards. Really must get round to testing the Via EPIA M10000 soon.

Found a really cheap motherboard that works great with the VIA C3 Nehemiah CPU's, ECS P6STP-FN, it's a SiS 630 chipset board, seller on eBay UK is selling them for £2.50 new in box if anyone is interested.works a treat with my C3 Nehemiah 1200 MHz.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/301915458957?_trksi … K%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

Seems a nice little board, the SiS graphics are pretty quick in DOS too, I ran Phil's benchmarks with very good results.

Best,
Chris

Tested the VIA EPIA 10000 against the SiS 630 with a Nehemiah 1.2GHz, the EPIA despite being 200MHz slower was the winner in Phil's ultimate VGA benchmarks. Getting a board to behave with these C3 chip these days is a trial though and the SiS ECS does very well.

I am using an Asus TUSL2-C, which is based on the Intel 815EP chipset. I run the Nehemiah at 1.4 GHz using SetMul. No problems. The drawback is the 512 MB RAM limit imposed by the Intel 815EP. Does the SiS 630 allow for more RAM?

bhtooefr wrote:

Nehemiah reports no L2 in the normal MSR for that, even when it's enabled, so that's normal for it to report none.

(And then there's the Samuel 2 that I've got, that reports 16 MiB in that MSR, when it's actually only got 64 kiB.)

That's why my newly aquired Samuel 2 reported 16MB L2... 😜

feipoa wrote:

I am using an Asus TUSL2-C, which is based on the Intel 815EP chipset. I run the Nehemiah at 1.4 GHz using SetMul. No problems. The drawback is the 512 MB RAM limit imposed by the Intel 815EP. Does the SiS 630 allow for more RAM?

The SiS 630 does take 512MB DIMMs, so 1GB for 2 DIMMs and 1.5GB for 3 DIMMs. But as you may have noticed that I ran into issues running over 512MB RAM with the Nehemiah. I do not have any 512MB SDRAM DIMMs to se if it also happens on my SiS 630ET based Asus TUSC.

One issue that I ran into with the Samuel 2 is somthing that looks like a compatibility issue with the drivers for my GeForce FX5500. When I tried to run Direct3D benchmark and games it gave me a blue screen in Windows XP SP3 or just exited the application in Windows 98SE.

feipoa wrote:

I am using an Asus TUSL2-C, which is based on the Intel 815EP chipset. I run the Nehemiah at 1.4 GHz using SetMul. No problems. The drawback is the 512 MB RAM limit imposed by the Intel 815EP. Does the SiS 630 allow for more RAM?

Yep, my ECS SiS 630 motherboard is working fine with 1 GB RAM.