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SiS 5500 chipset maximum cacheable RAM?

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First post, by 9646gt

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Hey guys, I purchased and am awaiting delivery of an IBM Aptiva 2176-C6B with a Pentium 166 and 257k cache because I needed/wanted a socket 7 system and always wanted this case design as a kid.

http://ps-2.kev009.com/pcpartnerinfo/ctstips/ef2e.htm states the board has an SiS 5500 chipset and I find very little information about it online. It has the 256K COAST module installed from what I can see and I know some of these old Pentium boards couldn't cache more than 64MB of RAM. I want to upgrade it with a single 128MB DIMM as it's supported as max but want to make sure it's cacheable so performance doesn't suffer. I o ow I'll ha e to upgrade the L2 COAST module to 512k if I want it to be cached but wanted to make sure this chipset will even properly support all this before spending more money.

Anyone have an answer? Or I ow where I can get other important info on the chipset since I'm having a hard time finding much? Thanks in advance.

Reply 1 of 4, by Horun

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Hmm shares some info with some others including the Microstar Ms-5123 iirc. Do you have a good picture of the board ?
I think they are using a misnamer calling it "5500" when the actual chips are 5501, 5502 and 5503. as well as 5511, 5512 and 5513
Check www.datasheetarchive.com for a datasheet but I can not find any info on cachabilty... Many SIS chipset datasheets are in the wind...

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 2 of 4, by 9646gt

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Horun wrote on 2023-02-28, 03:09:

Hmm shares some info with some others including the Microstar Ms-5123 iirc. Do you have a good picture of the board ?
I think they are using a misnamer calling it "5500" when the actual chips are 5511, 5512 and 5513
Check www.datasheetarchive.com for a datasheet but I can not find any info on cachabilty... Many SIS chipset datasheets are in the wind...

https://ancientelectronics.wordpress.com/2019 … model-2176-c77/
That pages shows what I think is a similar system although I believe the onboard graphics chip is actually different. I don't have mine in hand yet and the seller did not have any pictures of the internals. If it had such limited caching ability and I right in think you wouldn't have offered such a robust COAST upgrade option maybe?

Reply 3 of 4, by Horun

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Actually this datasheet does give cachable ram versus cache size
However that would also depend on how the board is laid out and bios too...

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Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 4 of 4, by 9646gt

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Horun wrote on 2023-02-28, 03:24:

Actually this datasheet does give cachable ram versus cache size
However that would also depend on how the board is laid out and bios too...

Thank you for that. Oddly is doesn't state that it supports CPU speeds as high as what IBM used in this model. It also says that 16mb are the largest SIMMS supported when IBM states 128MB total ram which would be 4x32mb SIMMS. It does seems to document that 128MB would be cacheable if I upgrade the COAST to 512k. I see the data sheet is dated 1995 so perhaps revisions afterwards allowed for faster CPU speeds and higher memory capacity. But, this at least seems to support the theory that with the right cache module you can cache beyond 64mb of RAM!

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