In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Felix Miata <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
writes
Roger Hayter wrote: [snipped]
Socket 7 systems are so old that there ought to be a K6/2 @ 500MHz or more or
a K6-III+ @400 or more to be had near you for between $0 and $25 or so. My
P2A-B has a K6/2-500. Any K6* of 400HMz or more should add enough performance
to get around several problems. IIRC, that Cyrix CPU only supports a FSB
speed of up to 75 MHz, while those K6 chips will all do 100 on the P5A-B.
Next, Socket 7 systems were originally designed to depend on motherboard
cache for RAM. I don't remember if the Ali chipset does better than most, but
I doubt it supports cache for all 512M. I do remember my K6/2-550 was
considerably slower on benchmarks with 384M than with 256M on a Tyan S1590
Trinity @ 100 MHz FSB (Via MVP3 chipset). The cache on a K6-III+ chip gets
around any shortage of motherboard cache, and can usually be run at 50-150
MHZ above its official rating.
So, the OS might be slow and have problems that need a solution, but a cheap
or free CPU upgrade should go a long way to alleviate some pain.
Have you run a RAM checker like memtest86? Does the Linux actually find all
512M? I thought Socket 7 chips were limited to 384M.
Yes, sorry I was reading the swap size I had set, it is using 256MB ram!
I take your point I could make the system faster, but I am fairly sure I
shouldn't need to. The CPU is 97% idle at rest with unnecessary
processes stopped but the load average is still 0.2+ - something is
wrong.
--
Roger Hayter
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