First post, by digitaldrifter
Howdy gents. Been a while since I've been on my old systems, so I decided to bust them out. A while back I built a Super Socket 7 system, but never really got around to messing around with it until recently. It is a K6-2+ 500 (@550), 384mb ram, 40gb hdd, and dual mismatched Voodoo 2's. The motherboard is a GA-5SMM.
The issue I'm having is that the system seemed slower than it should. After I got everything buttoned down, I did a Quake 2 timedemo. I don't have the 3dNOW! patch for it. The timedemo only netted me 34.2 FPS. Googling shows me that is is VERY VERY slow for what it should be, so I did several things, namely, removing one of the cards and running a different 3DFX driver. On the single card with stock drivers, I still got 32.6 FPS. Needless to say something is going on here.
My next guess was a cacheable ram issue. More Googling let me know that the SIS530 can only cache 64mb of ram (with 512k onboard cache, 128mb with 1mb cache). I don't know how much cache I have on the board, so I'm assuming the lowest number. I was running 3 sticks of 128mb DIMMS, so I took two out and tried it again. Same thing, low 30's framerate. So, the last thing I tried was to disable the external cache on the motherboard in the BIOS. Same thing, low 30's framerates.
I don't have anything less than 128mb DIMMS lying around, so I'm at my wits end. Is the board junk, or should I splurge and spend the $4 it'll take to buy and ship a 64gb stick of ram?
Joel