Mercury (i430LX), Neptune (i430NX) and Triton II (i430HX) are the only Intel Socket7 chipsets that have a cacheable area greater than 64 MB. Note that some HX boards still cache only 64 MB, because they are not equipped with the necessary external TAG-RAM.

Besides, it might be impossible to equip non-server boards with more than 256 MB, because FPM/EDO SIMMS bigger than 64 MB are quite rare and often are not compatible with consumer boards.

What does this mean? Should I go with Triton II for the bigger cacheable area? Or should I go with Triton 1 and reduce the amount of RAM I'm using? Or can I just go with the Triton 1 and my 128MB and figure I'm way ahead of anything I had back in '94 anyway? I'm getting confused.... 😖

I just picked up a motherboard for $3 -- so, if it works great, if you guys think I should go a different direction, it's only $3... I'd love some opinions... It's an AOpen AP5CP - Triton 1 chipset, 256k pipeline burst cache, Socket 5.

So now I have case, motherboard, CPU, Ram, dug up an old 16x CD-ROM and 3.5" floppy, so now I need an HDD and Graphics Card and I'm good to go.

Thanks for all the help so far -- I look forward to your comments on my motherboard selection...

That means that if you want more than 64MB, the L2 cache won't be able to cache data above 64 MB. The rest of the RAM will be a lot slower to access. 64 MB is probably plenty for a P100 tho! Going higher can cause problems with some DOS games, believe it or not. I have a PPRO with 128MB and haven't been able to get some DOS extender games to work with it unless I yank out some RAM.