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Troubleshooting : i think i figured it out (omg)

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First post, by xbit

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I've been working on system crashes for a few weeks now on my recently acquired Lucky Star LS-486E w/ an AMD 5x86 133 OC'ed to 160. Not only would win95 crash (tons) but even booting off a floppy. I started by removing the OC down to 130, removed cards one by one (modem, sound, nic), changed vid cards, reseated the memory, went down to just one stick of ram, replaced the hdd ribbon cable, cleared cmos, dbl checked motherboard jumpers for cpu voltage/bus clocks/cpu, etc. I was started to think my CPU was pushed to hard with overclocks in its previous life.

My next steps were to just review the bios settings one by one.. Went though a few when i got to the "disable L2 cache" option and BOOM.. have not crashed sense and i've stressed tested the heck out of it in win95 and dosbench.

Question, is the L2 chips that my MB has installed the original model? Does on-board L2 die from age? Is it even possible to replace?

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The X-Bit BBS @ https://x-bit.org/info

Reply 1 of 7, by Deunan

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All kinds of chips can die from age, high-speed cache SRAM is probably more prone to that than other, slower parts. Look for another set of 15ns chips, preferably hunt down 12ns ones for tags (or all of it, if you can find them and the price is acceptable) - this might come in handy if you want to O/C. Could be your new set of 15ns chips will work perfectly fine at 33MHz but not at 40, this is where faster tag might be useful.

Reply 2 of 7, by xbit

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Thank you, that was very helpful.

Sadly, not much to choose from on eBay at the moment.. 12 or 15ns w/ 32pins that my mb needs, but I'll keep looking.

The X-Bit BBS @ https://x-bit.org/info

Reply 4 of 7, by zyga64

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Looks like memory chips are in sockets. Maybe just the contacts oxidized ? Try to remove ICs from sockets and clean its pins (rubbing against a page of paper).
In addition, if you have TL866 programmer you can test SRAM memory chips in it (I'm not sure about this particular type).

1) VLSI SCAMP /286@20 /4M /CL-GD5422 /CMI8330
2) i420EX /486DX33 /16M /TGUI9440 /GUS+ALS100+MT32PI
3) i430FX /K6-2@400 /64M /Rage Pro PCI /ES1370+YMF718
4) i440BX /P!!!750 /256M /MX440 /SBLive!
5) iB75 /3470s /4G /HD7750 /HDA

Reply 5 of 7, by xbit

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konc wrote on 2023-02-28, 07:07:

Another possibility is too tight cache timing, if your BIOS has such settings.
Also beware with ebay cache chips, the very fast ones are often fake.

This guy looks solid. Lots of sells and good reviews:
https://www.ebay.com/usr/nz-tdm#tab2

Oh, and good call on that. I've never changed it from its auto config:

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Reply 6 of 7, by xbit

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zyga64 wrote on 2023-02-28, 08:46:

Looks like memory chips are in sockets. Maybe just the contacts oxidized ? Try to remove ICs from sockets and clean its pins (rubbing against a page of paper).
In addition, if you have TL866 programmer you can test SRAM memory chips in it (I'm not sure about this particular type).

Great suggestion on cleaning the connections. Thank you.

The X-Bit BBS @ https://x-bit.org/info

Reply 7 of 7, by xbit

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Update: Could the L2 issue end up being a memory issue? As it turns out, my 16meg ram has 3 sticks of parity and 1 non-parity. I'm not sure what type of issues this could create (if any), but i just updated it with 4 sticks of matching memory for a new total of 32megs. Ran memtest86+ and it passed > enabled L2 and ran it again and it passed > ran dos benchmarks with no issue. Rebooted into win95 where it would crash a ton before I disabled L2. Ran a number of bench programs with no issue.

So, day 1 hour 1 with the updated matching memory and the system has yet to crash but its to early to pop the champagne cork. Time will tell.

The X-Bit BBS @ https://x-bit.org/info

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