Playing with PC-Chips M918i or Ampron dx-9300 or whatever the name of this board is.

It is 1995 made and has ALi M1489 (FINALi 486) which I believe is the most modern 486 chipset with PCI and EDO RAM support.

It is one of the boards that can be either with fake cache chips or not. Luckily SRAM chips on my board are socketed and I replaced them with known working ones, just to be sure.

However, with L2 enabled the speedsys shows a very unusual looking graph showing that L2 read transfers(not writes) are actually slower than RAM:

Also confirmed by cachechk:

The cache is configured to use the best 2-1-1-1 latency read/write in BIOS.

Despite of the missing/underperforming L2 the performance of this motherboard is excellent. The RAM latency is actually faster than L2 latency on my other 486 boards with the same CPU. Incl. fairly modern ones like with SiS496 or UM8881F. Clearly EDO helps quite a bit.

There is no surprise that application performance is also very good and even tad better when you disable L2 cache in setup (which flattens the curve and give even higher speed in cachechk/speedsys). Like 15fps in Quake with non-overclocked 5x86-133 which is excellent.

With standard RAMs or slower settings in BIOS the cachechk/speedsys show that the L2 delivers faster performance than RAM, but overall performance is obviously slower.

I was wondering if the L2 slowdown thing is specific to this M918i motherboard or universal to all ALi M1489 boards or it is actually normal as the RAM is so fast so the L2 can't improve things.

Is the M1489 the fastest 486 chipset? I guess with working L2 it would scream.