Ok I have my first success!

I used 8 of these chips:

And this must be for the TAG:

Ok turns out for 128K only 4 chips are needed, but they have to go into the top bank (the ones with the larger sockets).

Woot got it going with 512KB of L2 Cache 😀

Doesn't make a difference really, so I will go back to 128KB.

But I understand how it all works now.

any particular reason you don't want 512k?

rgart wrote:

any particular reason you don't want 512k?

Not really. Saving them for something else maybe?

It didn't make a difference and the Acer isn't a race horse anyway.

I put a DX2-66 on the machine and filled all 9 Cache slots with new 15ns 16K chips, set the jumpers to 256K and all is sweet. Using these 15ns chips gave me better score compared to the 20ns 16K chips or the 15ns 128K chips.

Quite happy now. Got a solid 486DX2-66 with ATI graphics, 4MB onboard RAM with parity and 256KB Cache. It's a test-bench board anyway, won't go into a case but if I ever want to do a "how does this play on a real 486" project I can pull it out...

Amazing how expensive 486 boards. At least decent ones.

386 boards are cheaper which surprised me...

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Amazing how expensive 486 boards. At least decent ones.

386 boards are cheaper which surprised me...

486 is a more flexible DOS machine compared to a 386. More attractive games on a 486 as well. I guess that is what drives the prices up on 486 stuff. The good boards you get locally from guys who don't know what they are selling. On Ebay get prepared to pay! I'm just very happy I got my excellent board ( Asus VL/I-486SV2GX4 - probably the best VLB board out there) for a very good price.

Got the 5x86 going 😀

BIOS POST message reports a DX2-80, but CPUCHK confirms 33x4=133 MHz and CPU benchmarks are also much faster. So is Doom and Quake timedemo.

Do these DX2 and DX4 chips need a cooler? I haven't got anything that suits 486 chips...

yeah I'd always put a heatsink and fan on a 486 chip. they can get pretty damn hot.

DX2-66 can get really hot too.

I got an instant white blister many years ago from an intel overdrive DX4-100 when I touched it for like one second - those things get really freakin hot even with that big ass built in heat sink.

Ok I'll sort something out...

Next to the Mach32 onboard chip, it had 8 socketed memory chips and another 8 empty sockets. I pulled 8 chips (they also had 256 written on them and 70 which I presume is the memory capacity and the access time) and installed it.

VGA speed is faster now 😀 Went from 66.6 to 71.4 in 3dbench and 64.2 to 66.8 in version 1.0c 😀

And 1875 realtics in -timedemo demo3 -nosound SW version.