On 2 Apr 99, at 17:03, Jimmy Fikes wrote:

> I have installed 96 mb of RAM and have not seen the improvements in
> performance I wanted (I work with a lot of graphics).  I have a HP
> Pavilion 8160 with an Intel 82439TX Triton TX Chipset, running a Pentium
> MMX 234MHz processor.  The motherboard is Asus TX97XV, ver. 1.12.   I
> use SiSoft Sandra for system information.  It says that I have 96mb
> installed memory (146% true allocated load).  The L2External Cache is
> 256KB pipeline-burst write-back.  I installed three 32 mb chips, one
> each in Memory Bank 0, 2, and 3 (as shown in SiSoft Sandra).  My video
> card is ATI 3D RAGE II+(Direct X) with 2MB of memory.  In a performance
> tip, SiSoft Sandra says, "Chipset may not be able to cache all the
> physical memory installed."  It also says, "512KB of L2 cache is
> recommended for large memory systems.  Some memory may not be cached."
> What can I do to enhance or upgrade my system to take advantage of the
> 96mb RAM?

> ... with an Intel 82439TX Triton TX Chipset ...

> ... SiSoft Sandra says, "Chipset may not be able to cache all the
> physical memory installed."  ...

  The TX chipset's cache can only hold items in the first 64MB of RAM.
Data/code loaded above this point cannot be cached on this system.
This doesn't seem to make much difference to some systems, but I think
a version of the Asus TX97 was benchmarked as showing a 15% performance
penalty when >64MB of RAM was installed.  [No, I don't know why it was
so large when some other systems showed more like 2-3%.]

  Caching issues aside, the main benefit of additional RAM is to reduce
swapping to disk.  If your application load is already not doing much
swapping, adding RAM isn't going to speed it up any (even if it doesn't
slow it down as above).  [A lot of swapping to disk *is* typical of
graphics work with large images....]

  My recommendation -- and this might not fit your budget -- is to go
for one of the Via MVP3-based Super 7 motherboards with 1 MB of L2
cache on board.  I like the FIC VA-503+; it will take your existing RAM
and CPU, and can go to SDRAM and K6-2 or -3 as your needs dictate and
budget allows.

  [Intel made a Pentium "HX" chipset with a cache limit >64MB, but they
discontinued it to encourage people to go to PII for larger systems.]


David G

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