A buddy of mine asked me to have a look at his PC last nite. I took for a test ride, then opened it up to get a gander at his hardware & how it's setup...plus I copied down a few model numbers. His rig runs S-L-O-W!

I just looked into the specs on his board & HDD, & I believe I know what has to be done.

Here's what I found:

PCChips M598 motherboard (SiS 530 chipset)
K6-2/400 (4.0 x 100 @ 2.2v)
320mb PC100
Voodoo3 2000 16mb PCI
WDC 15.3GB 5400rpm 2mb ATA33/66
50x CD drive

OK, to start with, the HDD & CD drive share the same IDE cable...it's a 40-wire type, so he's not hitting his potential of ATA66 (the board does support this). Also, during bootup, I saw that it's running in PIO 4 mode (16.6mb/sec). Even with the 40-wire cable, it should be getting ATA33, so I assume the CD drive is holding it back.

Also, I checked into his board specs for RAM cacheability, & it caches either 128mb or 256mb, depending on whether it has 1mb or 2mb of L2 cache. Either way, at 320mb, he's over the cache limit.

Here's what I propose to do:

- install an 80-wire IDE on the HDD & set it up as the primary master
- change the CD drive to secondary master
- lower the amount of RAM to within the cache limit (once I find out what that limit is)

- update BIOS? I may or may not do this...it depends on what version he has now.

My question is pretty general...how much of a difference do you think these changes are likely to make? I'm assuming it's gonna be like nite & day...

Hi

Have all the necessary drivers in place. Sounds like a chipset, ide driver issue.

Amount Ram lools fine. refer link.

http://www.pcchips.com.tw/M598.html

Similar Mother board sheet - diff location

The thing with the spec sheet is it doesn't mention the RAM cache limit. It tells the max RAM you can install (768mb), but according to what I found about the SiS 530 chipset, the cache limit is either 128mb or 256mb. I have to find out how big the L2 cache is though....

http://www.stud.fernuni-hagen.de/q3998142/pcchips/howto/cache.html#sis530

Even after all the changes ou may not notice a big change in performance, due to the CPU. I had a K6-2 450 once, i'm surprised it could even open word, let alone play solitare. It can't even play Diablo 2, which requires a p166. and to top it all off it had 256mb ram (within cache limit) and a geforce 4.

Unfortunately, it turned out his board is an early version & only has 512k L2...which means 64mb is the cache limit. I tried all sorts of combinations & changes...it's just SLOW! Probably the best way to sort things out would be a complete format & start from scratch with Win98.

Thanks.

Hi

Woops sorry there. I competely stuffed it. Went looking for the wrong thing. Yes I'm inclined to thiink ram

Hi

I had that page sitting there too long. (hadn't seen #4) Ok least of all the computer has a good excuse for bing slow - unlike myself :-)