Too Much RAM???

Last week I got some more RAM for my machine, a 256Mb PC133. To go along with the 128Mb I all ready had. Manly because it was so cheap but also with an eye on XP when it arives.

My system would appear sluggish, bench marks are almost unchanged (slight inprovement) but in real world usage it would appear to have degraded the performance.

I have a Soltek P54U5 MoBo VIA MVP3 Soket 7 with a K6-2 500MHz CPU. the board has a 512Kb Cache.
386Mb of Memory running at 100MHz
O/S Win ME
also running "Memory interleaver for VIA chip sets" a small util that enables interleaving. (this program work well on my machine giving a smal but notisable speed improvment)

Is it posible that the lack of second level cache is afecting performance? (The cache can't address that much memory.)

Also I have arriving soon a new K6-2+ CPU. Because the chip has 2nd level cache on board the MoBo's cache becomes 3rd level, will this make any improvments to the memory problems? if that is what it is...

(sorry for the spelling)

Run system with only the 256 strip see if she runs sluggish.Also run it back on the 128 strip see if it runs better.

Post results here.

Yes, with the Via support chips it is likely that you've gone over the cacheable limit. Do as Diehrd suggests, with 512k you may only get caching up to 128M. Different brands of M/board seem to claim different limits, so it may depend on the particular caching strategy used.

For some purposes the on-chip second-level cache may alleviate the performance hit, but if the CPU is shifting enough data to saturate the cache, it won't make any difference.

For the amount of memory you're talking about, you're almost certainly better off with Windows 2000

yup hes right. Win9x aint stable with anything over 128mb ram.

I dunno what m$ was thinking about when they made millenium?? why didnt they sort those limits?? same with the 4gb filesize limit on fat32............ try go for win2k

I agree with Diehrd, but not with that last post above me. The whole Win9x and 128MB max usuable is a myth in my opinion. Win9x just does not manage memory well at all, it has nothing to do with a supposed 128MB problem. At worst your MB may be picky about what memory it can use.

--Aster

im running win 98 first edition w/ 256meg ram, and it's no less stable than win98 w/ 64 megs of ram.

now, for your problem, i'm sure that it's the memory cacheable limit problem. i think i read somewhere that the via mvp chipset can cache up to 256 megs. i believe that it was in a toms hardware socket 7 chipset review. you might want to check it out.

Windows 2k is the only way to utilize your memory....Just my 2 cents...

Thanks for your imput on this question, as I said in my original post I was expecting a new CPU. Well I'm now the proud owner of a new AMD K6-2+ 450MHz CPU, with the extra cache on the chip the slugishness has gone. I have the chip running at 570MHz (95X6) although I'm hoping for 600MHz.
I shall be starting a thread to ask for some more help with voltages...