Asus P5A (Socket 7)

[Justorq]

Hey people...
I have a question about the amount of RAM that could be cached on this board.
I read here at anandtech that it's 128 and at lostcircuits it was 256...
How do they get these numbers ... There's nothing written about this in the manual.

Thx!

 

[Justorq]

Cmon ... ANYONE???
PLZ!!!

 

[majewski9]

I Don't know what you trying to ask!

Are you asking if you can use 128megs ram or 256megs ram in your Dimm?

 

[Justorq]

What is maximum the amount of RAM that can be chached ...
sorry !

 

[RC7]

I'm not sure what you mean by 'ram that can be cached,' but on this ASUS P5A-B (same board, only baby at) I have 160mb of PC100 running fine.

 

[majewski9]

Are you talking about a ramdrive? I thought you set that in windows!

You aren't talking about onboard L2 or L3 cache, because that is built into the board!

 

[Justorq]

I read in the anandtech article on the asus P5A that: "Unfortunately, the current design of the ALi Aladdin V Chipset only allows for the first 128MB of RAM to be cached, meaning anything above that would end up slowing you down more than it could possible speed you up."

There was another article at lostcircuits that stated: "ASUS went one step beyond and modified the ALiAladdin V chipset, in that the flawed tag RAM of the L2 cache (in Rev. E of the chipset) was disabled and replaced by their own 10 bit version. This results in a cacheable amount of 256 MB of RAM with the 512 kB L2 cache version and 512 MB cacheable with the (yet to be released) 1024kB L2 version of the P5A."

All I want to know is which one is right and how do they get that info???
THX!

 

[Vincent]

Did you try looking at the Asus website or your motherboard manual?

 

[Justorq]

Actually yes I did and I didn't find anything about this issue!

 

[Remnant2]

The old socket 7 systems had an external tagram chip that controls the amount of RAM cacheable by the (external!) L2 cache.

I thought the cachable limit was 256mb, but there is an easy way to test : run SANDRA memory benchmarks at 128mb and 256mb. If it drops precipitously going to 256, then you've passed your cacheable area.

 

[drewski]

it could also depend on the CPU that is installed.

i have an Asus t2p4 which could only cache 64MB (430HX? chipset) w/o the tagram with a regular Pentium, but could cache 512MB w/ a K6-III that had 256kb onboard L2 cache (even without the tagram chip).

 

[Justorq]

True !!
Thx a lot guys !!