Meh, that´s like my P133 on SiS 5511 - have You memory interleaving in BIOS enabled? If these option is not in BIOS, try this:
Next, try every mem stick separately, if something changes.

It also doesn't feel as fast in OS itself, win98se should fly on this config. Unfortunately it doesn't have that option in bios (will check again when I come home from work) and test with other memory, and buy a few more sticks, don't have any other pc133 at home. Would I improve anything if I buy another board, perhaps with the intel chipset?

Thank you for this driver, will test once I get home!

That has to work better on this board, you don't have to buy another one. Although VIA is weaker than Intel, it certainly doesn't have to look this tragic. Something's misaligned somewhere, sometimes two different RAM modules don't work optimally.
Let's go over the BIOS settings first and see.

Also try to remove that USB 2.0 PCI card. It's known that some of them can cause massive slowdowns.
And make sure your SB Live uses vxd drivers.

A quick test on MSI 6309 with VIA 694X/686A with P3 1GHz Cumine - as you can see, even without memory interleaving, the performance is miles ahead of what Sandra shows you. The mem timings are on the screens, Sandra version too.
After installing the mem interleaving patche, the performance would go further up (the BIOS option is also missing).

I would recommend to remove all PCI cards and keep only 1 memory stick. Close all unnecessary processes when running benchmark. On my PIII memory score can vary between 50-100% of what is expected as if some processes or drivers sometimes interfered with it. I have to re-run it multiple times to get the expected score. Another option is to try wpcredit to enable some settings missing in BIOS. There is a lot more to tune than interleaving.

If I remember correctly an acceptable score for K6-2 was about 100MB/s and about 160MB/s for Celeron at 75Mhz FSB on Via chipset.

Even on VIA I would have expected to get at least 500MB/s given that PIII has SSE and you have 133Mhz memory clock.

have you treid updating bios to letest version and removing cmos battery to reset bios settings? (sometimes load defaults and load fail safe do not work)
i love QDI brand and have used many of thir boards with VIA chipset (both s370 and s462) but i do not remember ever being so slow.
also its worth a shot to check capacitors, maybe its time for recap...

Well first thing I tried was taking out that USB pci card and I saw an improvement from the moment I turned on the pc and testing only confirmed it. Quake 2 also runs like a charm now. Also installed that driver, but it didn't make any difference.
Will try out every stick on its own, but looks like these are normal numbers, USB 1 is slow though 😒

A big thank you to everyone who replied!

What is the chipset on this USB PCI card?

Cheers,

Hi,

VIA VT6212.

thanks

sirotkaslo wrote on 2021-08-05, 16:51:

Also installed that driver, but it didn't make any difference.

This means. that interleaving is already on in the bios from the board manufacturer and only missing the option to turn it off/on in setup. Driver helps if interleaving is disabled and the setup lacks the ability to turn it on.
It looks like the USB card was causing the problem - which USB drivers do you have installed? Did the card share any IRQ with what? If so, you can try it in another PCI slot.

Did some more testing today. With the card installed again, I got full bandwith, but once I plugged in a usb flash drive and copied one small file made a rerun of the test and once again 60MB/s. It does take quite a few IRQs and some are shared, will just take the card out and copy everything directly to the SSD with a usb-pata adapter. Thank you once again!

I also gave up having USB 2.0 card in my PIII rig as it consumed 3 IRQs and there just isn't enough of them. I would have to disable LPT1, COM1 & 2. My BIOS setup doesn't allow limiting the number of IRQs used by PCI, only have them reserved for ISA. Since I also got WiFi 802.11g with WPA2 + AES working in Windows 98SE I don't really need USB 2.0 anymore.

You can get higher memory performance not only by enabling interleaving, but also by setting higher "in order queue depth". It's displayed in Sisoft Sandra Mainboard Information. For 440BX it is 4. I vaguely remember VIA chipsets used a very low value 1 out of box, but 4 could be set in wpcredit (pcr file for 693A has "[50:7]=In-Order Queue depth 0=1-level 1=4-level"). There are many other settings you can try enabling like "CPU DRAM prefetch depth=4", "CPU DRAM post-write depth=4", "CPU DRAM read 0 ws", "CPU DRAM write 0 ws". I played with it a lot when I had Celeron back in the day and got a very good memory performance out of it. I used Celerons for gaming as at 75Mhz FSB and tuned VIA chipset they performed better than a K6-2.

Have you tried Via latency patch? https://www.georgebreese.com/net/software/ Maybe nothing will change, but it won't hurt to try - but I recommend backing up the system before.

Will try this also thanks. Tried everything else, but it seems that because it takes so many IRQs it causes some interference after first use of either of those USB ports.