Well, the way I fgure, if you can find a couple of old 486
motherboards, go ahead and take the cache chips from them. It can't hurt
performance. It was really easy for me to find two boards with matching
cache chips, that are on the "recommended" parts list.

---   David A Woyciesjes
---   C & IS Support Specialist
---   Yale University Press
---   mailto:david.woyciesjes@yale.edu
---   (203) 432-0953
---   ICQ # - 905818


-> -----Original Message-----
-> From: Joerg Czeranski [mailto:jc@joerch.org]
-> Sent: Sunday, March 18, 2001 6:38 AM
-> To: mouse@Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA
-> Cc: port-alpha@netbsd.org
-> Subject: Re: NoName and cache
-> 
-> 
-> der Mouse wrote:
-> > I've got a NoName, 16MB RAM (4x4M), and its speed is 
-> comparable to or
-> > perhaps a bit slower than my SPARCs' (doing a "make build" with
-> > comparable disk drives).
-> >
-> > How much difference does adding cache actually make?  Does 
-> anyone have
-> > before-and-after numbers, or even "feel" comments?  (I'm 
-> just thinking
-> > that there's no point sinking effort into finding cache chips if it
-> > really doesn't make any practical difference, for 
-> example.)  Does 15ns
-> > versus 20ns cache make any practical difference?  Would adding more
-> > ordinary RAM help?  (If so, anybody got a source for RAM 
-> for the thing?
-> > All my 16MB sticks are 32-bit or 33-bit, not 36-bit, and I think
-> > they're all slower than 70ns anyway.)
-> 
-> Hi,
-> I have a NoName and once measured the effect of adding cache.
-> 
-> The situation is a bit different for me, though:
-> It's a 233MHz 21066A with 128MB RAM and Dec Unix 4.
-> 
-> I bought 256KB 12ns cache (that's an unsupported option, ask me
-> if you want to know the "secret" jumper setting).
-> 
-> As a benchmark I compiled O'Caml.  To reduce the influence of the
-> hard disk, I put everything into /tmp mounted as memory filesystem.
-> 
-> The speedup was a factor of 1.6.  I think it should've been even
-> better with 1MB cache, but I didn't find a source for the wide-
-> package chips.
-> 
-> Of course with a mere 16MB RAM it might be quite different,
-> especially as gcc really wants a lot of RAM.
-> I think you should first try to install enough RAM to prevent paging
-> before you think about cache.
-> 
-> Unfortunately, 36-bit PS/2 SIMMs are rare and therefore 
-> rather expensive.
-> 
-> joerch
->