Buying extra stuff for this build is off the table. I scrounged up the board and k6-2, they aren't getting replaced. I have a hoard of SDRAM so I can do whatever there, but so far the system seems snappy with 64MB. My HDD is a 7200RPM UW SCSI job with cache so swaps aren't too slow.

what kind of software are you running? 64MB was considered plenty of ram during most of windows 9x days,
I would take the extra performance over extra capacity in this case,

The purpose of this build is an AWE64 value + SIMMCONN to play games that use general MIDI with soundfonts

I think if you up the ram it would be a benifit in the long run. Not sure why anyone did not mention the TAG size in cache, it has more to do with how much real ram is cached than just the actual cache size. As Tiido said: more RAM even with some uncached is waaaaaaay faster than less RAM.

Horun wrote on 2020-01-16, 04:08:

I think if you up the ram it would be a benifit in the long run. Not sure why anyone did not mention the TAG size in cache, it has more to do with how much real ram is cached than just the actual cache size. As Tiido said: more RAM even with some uncached is waaaaaaay faster than less RAM.

If your using it, if your not exceeding 64mb for what your doing it will be incredibly slow if it uses non cached ram instead of cached, it's only worth it if your using more than 64mb to run your games.

Tiido wrote on 2020-01-13, 14:30:

I have found that more RAM even with some uncached is waaaaaaay faster than less RAM where swapfile is used often.

Yes for sure,

but i can see FPS Jumps on Quake 3 when running on K6-2 😁
you clearly see when the game is loaded inside uncached RAM and when it starts using more it gets jumpy.
this also happens with k6-3 but with lesser effect due to l2 of the cpu caching whole ram, but the region with l3 is still.. a bit faster 😁

Also windows has some stupid adressing scheme, so the impact is much greater on Windows 9x then on linux.