First post, by auron
it appears that my jetway 430FX board has some kind of problem with its cache. this manifested itself specifically in network transfers that came out with bad crc checksums, and even more specifically, files about 20mb or bigger. about 1 in 10 times they would show a correct checksum, mostly it was randomly bad. any smaller file showed no issue. i went and eliminated about any other variable and was ready to call this an issue with win95's network stack, until i thought to try and disable the external cache - since then, any file transfer came out fine.
the setup is 256k onboard, 2x UM61-3232AF-7 and IS61C64AH-15N tag, and it's upgraded with another 256k on coast, 2x W25P010AF-8 and IS61C64AH-15J tag. i recall that some asus coast that i had didn't work on this board and thought that the board might need the 2nd tag. i've literally beaten quake on this setup years ago and it's still running heavy games like that seemingly fine, but it looks like it's silently corrupting files now. if only large files are affected one could probably be using this for a while without even noticing.
i've tried reseating the coast module about five times, didn't change anything. when i run the ctcm17a tool, it hangs midway with a blinking prompt, i think before it should show "write strategy", and at the bottom it says MMOVI and nothing else - this should be for MMX which the CPU doesn't have so not sure what's going on. it does the exact same thing with the cache disabled too. what other tool could test L2 cache?
if i had to guess it's probably the coast, and i need to jumper it to 256k and just test with the onboard cache. it seems unlikely to me that the higher latency on the coast chips would present an issue on a 430FX board, and there is no l2 latency setting unlike later boards. i could try to apply the bios update as a last resort though.