Does anybody know where I can get the correct cache modules for an AM5x86 on a UMC UM82C881 based board?

Just found out this board came with no L2 cache installed. Probably partly explains the less than stellar performance.

EDIT: Are these cheap chips from china legit? I know I've heard about fake cache modules.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/126549299610

PARKE wrote on 2025-10-03, 20:49:

Let us know what you find. Vogons member VooDooMan did not have much luck with his sample: Overclocking Pentium III / Celeron: […]
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sunkindly wrote on 2025-10-03, 20:24:

After no success with a 900MHz SL4SD or a 1GHz SL5QV and have been running on a 133fsb 1GHz SL4C8, finally had luck with the 1100MHz SL5QW. Might try some overclocking later!

Let us know what you find.
Vogons member VooDooMan did not have much luck with his sample:
Overclocking Pentium III / Celeron: Coppermine and Tualatin cores - Socket 370

Thanks, this is super helpful! It seems pretty par with the chart, it POSTs at 120 but fails to get through 3DMark2000. Even at 110 it freezes during the benchmark but it might be a memory thing as I'm running at PC100. Might upgrade later and try it out but I'm pretty happy with 1.1GHz regardless.

Gave my Win98 machine a proper optical drive. Case it's in has no drive bays, so I hooked up an I/O Magic 4x4x6 External CDRW I had. Works great! Tested by installing X-Win 95. Analog audio output hooked to Sound Blaster Audigy line-in.

Blazing 6x over USB 1.1 speeds! Love it! 🤣

Installed a Turion64 in a 754 motherboard using a 1mm copper shim. Surprisingly the motherboard detected the exact model (thought desktop mobos would not recognize mobile CPUs). Downlocked and voltaged lowered with CrystalCPU and now running Prime95 to check stability. Why? It's all in a tiny HTPC case and the PSU is right above the CPU so I want it to be as cool (and quiet) as possible.

I remember when I first encountered a Turion 64 in the wild inside a laptop. When I saw a 64-bit processor in a computer like that, I was convinced that we had reached peak mobile computing.

kolderman wrote on 2025-10-04, 00:23:

Installed a Turion64 in a 754 motherboard using a 1mm copper shim. Surprisingly the motherboard detected the exact model (thought desktop mobos would not recognize mobile CPUs). Downlocked and voltaged lowered with CrystalCPU and now running Prime95 to check stability. Why? It's all in a tiny HTPC case and the PSU is right above the CPU so I want it to be as cool (and quiet) as possible.

I had no idea you could do this. 🤷

Of course, I think I've only had maybe two Socket 754 boards in my possession in the past 20 years, so I haven't had much of an opportunity to use them.

Am I reading correctly online that the ML-44 manages 2.4Ghz with 1MB of cache at only a 35W TDP while the desktop equivalent with the same clock speed and cache has an 89W TDP? That would be pretty nice to have in a tiny PC from the time period.

Gotta love yield binning

Today I upgraded an 8MB Voodoo 2 to a 12MB Voodoo 2. Always a challenge with the tight spaces between chips but usually worth it!

aspiringnobody wrote on 2025-10-04, 05:22:

Today I upgraded an 8MB Voodoo 2 to a 12MB Voodoo 2. Always a challenge with the tight spaces between chips but usually worth it!

The attachment IMG_7762.jpeg is no longer available

Very nice. Do you simply just add the memory or do you need to change some resistors as well?

zuldan wrote on 2025-10-05, 10:42:

aspiringnobody wrote on 2025-10-04, 05:22:

Today I upgraded an 8MB Voodoo 2 to a 12MB Voodoo 2. Always a challenge with the tight spaces between chips but usually worth it!

The attachment IMG_7762.jpeg is no longer available

Very nice. Do you simply just add the memory or do you need to change some resistors as well?

IIRC you just add ram chips.
On YT there are many videos + an upgrade to > 100MHz chips.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-10-04, 01:59:

I had no idea you could do this. :shrug: […]
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kolderman wrote on 2025-10-04, 00:23:

Installed a Turion64 in a 754 motherboard using a 1mm copper shim. Surprisingly the motherboard detected the exact model (thought desktop mobos would not recognize mobile CPUs). Downlocked and voltaged lowered with CrystalCPU and now running Prime95 to check stability. Why? It's all in a tiny HTPC case and the PSU is right above the CPU so I want it to be as cool (and quiet) as possible.

I had no idea you could do this. 🤷

Of course, I think I've only had maybe two Socket 754 boards in my possession in the past 20 years, so I haven't had much of an opportunity to use them.

Am I reading correctly online that the ML-44 manages 2.4Ghz with 1MB of cache at only a 35W TDP while the desktop equivalent with the same clock speed and cache has an 89W TDP? That would be pretty nice to have in a tiny PC from the time period.

My Turion'sbase is 2.2ghz, lowered it to 6x (1.2ghz) and vcore down to 0.97v, I can't even feel the heatsink warm even slightly. Seems completely stable as well, and more than enough for the kind of Win98 games I want to play on it.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2025-09-23, 20:36:

My quest for a Socket 939 system has reached its ultimate form. it started because I ended up with some 939 CPUs, then I found a local store selling NOS Asus A8V-X. Then I was disappointed in that, so I upgraded the CPU, then the video card. Still disappointed, I got a Gigabyte K8U 939 for cheap, and recapped it, but it was only a little better than the Asus board.

I bought a parts lot of 939 boards and CPUs over a year ago and mostly let them sit. Inspired by another member's thread on building a 939 system, I finally dusted off the A8N SLI Premium, and used the Opteron 180 and memory from my AGP 939 system, and combined it with a GTX 260 (for some reason my GTS 250 will not work on this board). After tweaking and overclocking it, I have a system that performs better than any of my previous 939 combos, and much better than the 939 system I had from 2005 to 2008.

Finding the last BIOS for the A8N SLI Premium was easy, but the flash utility was a bit more difficult. I tried a version of Awardflash, but it wasn't correct, and Uniflash was no better. I read the manual, and it had a screenshot showing "Awardbios Flash Utility for Asus V1.01"; I searched for that and found a bundle of flash utility programs on The Internet Archive that included it. Once I had that, it was smooth sailing. I emailed a copy of that version of Awardflash to The Retro Web to save people the trouble in the future.

My Retro drivers got small update and Retro gaming @ Rage Pro (XL) 8MB AGP hardware.
Re: ATi RagePro drivers and software

zuldan wrote on 2025-10-05, 10:42:

aspiringnobody wrote on 2025-10-04, 05:22:

Today I upgraded an 8MB Voodoo 2 to a 12MB Voodoo 2. Always a challenge with the tight spaces between chips but usually worth it!

The attachment IMG_7762.jpeg is no longer available

Very nice. Do you simply just add the memory or do you need to change some resistors as well?

Every one I’ve ever seen already had all the necessary bypass caps and such even though then memory modules themselves are absent. So, it’s plug and play. Nothing required but the ram!

aspiringnobody wrote on 2025-10-06, 00:19:

zuldan wrote on 2025-10-05, 10:42:

aspiringnobody wrote on 2025-10-04, 05:22:

Today I upgraded an 8MB Voodoo 2 to a 12MB Voodoo 2. Always a challenge with the tight spaces between chips but usually worth it!

The attachment IMG_7762.jpeg is no longer available

Very nice. Do you simply just add the memory or do you need to change some resistors as well?

Every one I’ve ever seen already had all the necessary bypass caps and such even though then memory modules themselves are absent. So, it’s plug and play. Nothing required but the ram!

That's so cool. The 90s really were an awesome time for computing.

I wish it was that easy to upgrade memory on modern cards, like turning an RTX 3080 10GB into a 12GB (I know, there are much larger differences than the memory capacity). Some have turned them into 20GB cards by swapping out chips apparently, but the amount of skill, tools and time required to do that puts it way beyond what most enthusiasts could manage.

On the other hand, I am fairly confident that with my limited experience I could use my hot air gun and solder paste to install four more chips on an 8MB Voodoo 2, and unless I made a mistake it could be done in minutes with no disassembly or reassembly required. 😀

Installed sockets for the following on my IBM 5150 board:

P8284A clock generator chip (mine might be faulty and I did the socket so it can be swapped on the fly)
Bank 0 RAM + bit pairty for Bank 0 (so they can be swapped easily)

I still get the continuous beep, which means the 8284 is most likely dead as a hammer or the RAM is dead. Either that or U33 (BIOS) is bad. When I get the EPROMs, I'll do the diagnostics ROM first and see if it boots up with that and if it does, then I'll do the GLaBIOS ROM and go from there. If it doesn't boot with the U33 swapped, then I'll have to replace the P8284A with a new one and if it boots up, then it's fixed entirely and I can get it all set up with an ATi EGA Wonder 800, Sound Blaster 2.0 w/ CMS upgrade, AST SixPakPlus SPK-384 upgraded to 576KB RAM, XT-FDC card, and XT-CF connected. I'll have to figure out how to hook up the internal speaker header to the sound card, but that should be just a 4-pin header and only solder on the audio part from the header to the mic input on the sound card. Either that or figure out a better way since there is no PC speaker header on the sound card itself.

While I was testing some new SCSI cable (50p to SCSI SE) I discovered that the enclosures of 2 drives were actually not working:

1st. was working at the beginning but later couldn't provide enough juice (probably a dead cap), testing with a dead cd-rom drive (it's a big 5.25 bay enclosure).

2nd. the buck converter that is on is dead. It lets +5.xxV to GND and no +V to where it is supposed to (it's a floppy plug, +5 / g / g / +12 reading 0 / +5.6 / +5.6 / 0 ).

Drives that were inside work perfectly well, guess they got tossed for that reason.

Good thing I test them taking the drives out of enclosures.

aspiringnobody wrote on 2025-10-04, 05:22:

Today I upgraded an 8MB Voodoo 2 to a 12MB Voodoo 2. Always a challenge with the tight spaces between chips but usually worth it!

The attachment IMG_7762.jpeg is no longer available

Were did you buy RAM chips ?
I'm planning to the same with my card.

Locutus wrote on 2025-10-06, 23:31:

aspiringnobody wrote on 2025-10-04, 05:22:

Today I upgraded an 8MB Voodoo 2 to a 12MB Voodoo 2. Always a challenge with the tight spaces between chips but usually worth it!

The attachment IMG_7762.jpeg is no longer available

Were did you buy RAM chips ?
I'm planning to the same with my card.

I borrowed them from a broken V2 with a TMU ripped off the card by the prior owner. There’s a guy on eBay who sells the chips you need but I think his price is a bit high.

My upgraded V2 found its forever home today!