You can buy them from Aliexpress. I did and they all worked fine. Just note that many of them are sold as 10ns, but delievered as 15ns. Artex tried to fight them on this, but he only got his item refunded.

This is the seller I bought from (he has increased price since I bought last year):
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/IS61C1024-10N- … 1832174608.html

I see there are loads of other sellers with lower prices after I did a quick search.

Just as a matter of interest.
How much of an improvement does one gain by upgrading your L2 cache from 128kb to 256kb or 512kb?
Where does this benefit come in mostly (which applications)?

jesolo wrote:

Just as a matter of interest.
How much of an improvement does one gain by upgrading your L2 cache from 128kb to 256kb or 512kb?
Where does this benefit come in mostly (which applications)?

Speed wise, nothing, as far as I know (with L2). What you do gain is cachable RAM.

I always go with 256 KB Cache, which involves buying 9 identical cache chips. These are the ones I use: http://au.element14.com/cypress-semiconductor … i-55c5-00001621

Got them on my 386 and 486 boards and they work great 😀

Cache is dependent on the mode it is operating in and the amount of RAM you have installed. Actually adding more cache can reduce performance on some motherboards.

In Write-Back mode, 256K is adequate for 32MB of RAM (128K is enough for 16MB), small reason you would need any more. In Write-Thru mode, the amount of RAM you can use before performance drops off doubles.

It doesn't sound right that a larger L2 cache would go unused. Would be interesting to see some comparisons.

firage wrote:

It doesn't sound right that a larger L2 cache would go unused. Would be interesting to see some comparisons.

There is a performance difference, about 1-4%
Socket 5 & 7 Motherboard VGA Benchmark comparison (Socket 5 and 7 boards)

Take the ASUS PCI/I P54SP4 (SIS 50x, Socket 5) for instance:
256kb: 98,87
512kb: 99,01
1024kb: 104,05

Or Freetech 586F11 (Intel 430FX, Socket 5):
256kb: 102,94
512kb: 105,46

If 512Kb was much better than 256Kb, my system would be the fastest among Am5x86-based PCs in Phil's Ultimate VGA benchmark. Guess what? It isn't 😀 It is only the second best among SIS 496/497 boards, despite being the only one with 512Kb cache.

This is my post in Phil's benchmark thread:

kixs wrote:

Upgraded cache to 512KB (AMD@160MHz-WB): […]
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kixs wrote:

Finally got my GA486AM/S working with AMD 5x86-P75 in WB mode. […]
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Finally got my GA486AM/S working with AMD 5x86-P75 in WB mode.

Config:
GA486AM/S v2.21, 256KB 15ns cache
AMD 5x86-P75 133MHz
2x4MB FPM RAM
Tseng ET6000 2.25MB PCI
BIOS set to fastest settings

Upgraded cache to 512KB (AMD@160MHz-WB):

3DBench...98.8
PCPlayer...25.6
Doom...1232
Quake...15.5

I'll try to get 1024kB cache in the future as this motherboard has support.

If it was only about the cacheable RAM,then there wouldn't be much improvement. But if the cache is large enough that the program code fits all in, then the main RAM isn't even accessed and it runs faster.