First post, by PDXTony
Hello awesome community!
I am running this exact motherboard (even contributed a BIOS dump and image!):
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/bek-tronic-bek-v409
I have been enjoying a 486 DX-2 66mhz on it for some time and decided to get myself a Pentium Overdrive 83mhz CPU to drop in.
According to the manual, there are no jumper settings to change to go from a 486 to the Pentium Overdrive, so I didn't change anything.
The problem statement is - if I have external cache enabled in the BIOS, the memory count at bootup is slower than usual and it doesn't count up to the correct number of memory. It also doesn't continue after the memory is counted - it will hang during floppy drive seeking.
If I disable external cache in the BIOS, it counts all the memory normally, but there seems to be some stability issues at that point where Windows 95 either says there's not enough memory or MIMEM.SYS has detected unreliable XMS memory. The BIOS also allows me to enable/disable internal cache - if I disable that as well, there's no improvement in booting into Windows 95 without the same errors.
With the 486 CPU, enabling external cache works without any issues, and there have been zero stability issues in using the computer.
The question is, is this expected behavior?
If not, might you have a recommendation for what I should do to enable external cache and not have it do this?
Also, here's my actual motherboard in case you wanted to see exactly what's populated in each cache socket:
https://theretroweb.com/motherboard/image/bek … b5843158603.jpg
Thank you!
Tony
