>>Hi Stephen ---
>>
>>>Set reality on
>>>
>>>Don't load anything in startup. Get yourself more ram than you think sane and things will work better.
>>
>>Au contraire. There is a certain point, I think it's 128MB, where system performance on Win9x actually begins to degrade. I have heard this issue discussed here on the UT; perhaps our more hardware-enlightened brethren can provide more details.
>>
>>But back to the core issue, I'm suggesting possible deviations from the norm for Frank, not suggesting that these ideas *are* the norm.
>
>The chipset on the motherboard is very critical for good performance with large memory. The tag rag supported for caching is the controlling factor. Many popular Pentium chipsets will only cache the first 64MB (eg. intel FX and VX), others (eg. intel HX and TX will cache 512MB). Other brands have different capabilities. You must know the capabilities of your chipset when adding RAM.
Not quite right. For Pentium (Socket 7) processors, the 430FX and 430VX chipsets only address the first 64MB of RAM; IOW, you can't put >64MB in the system. The 430TX can address 512MB, but can only cache the content of the first 64MB in the L2 cache. The 430HX, given a second tag RAM (an additional SRAM that increases both the available cache memory and the size of the cache buffer address space) can cache the 512MB address space in L2 cache, however, without the second tag RAM, it'll only cache the content of the first 64MB in L2 cache.
Other non-Intel chipsets for the Socket 7 family (P54 (Pentium Classic) and P55 (Pentium with MMX) processors, as well as compatibles from other vendors like AMD and Cyrix) have different cache capabilities. Some of them support very large L2 caches and cache the full address space.
Other Intel and Intel compatible processors that are not using Socket 7 (like the Pentium Pro, Celeron, Pentium II, Pentium II and Xeon families) don't use the 430 family boards. The chipset in this case has less effect on the caching than the processor itself, since the L2 cache is on the processor (either on the CPU die, in the case of the pentium Pro or the latest batch of Celerons, or in the processor asssembly iself for the PII/PIII/Xeon processors). In all of these cases, the address space cached is >64MB, but may not extended to the full physical address space supported by the processor (PII with >512MB for example.)
