Asus P5S-VM Super Socket 7 mobo getting like 10mb/s ram speed with PC100

[BentValve]

Asus PSS-VM Super Socket 7 mobo getting like 10mb/s ram speed with PC100 , ive tried running the ram @ 133mhz , ive tried swapping the ram out all to no avail.

Now I am unistalling XP and trying Windows 98 to see if that helps.

The CPU is a k62 500mhz that OCs nicely to 550mhz.


Any ideas why the ram is so slow? Perhaps its just a bad board?

 

[Peter]

That's P5S-VM, no?

There are several things to consider. The board's BIOS might not set the K6-2 up to the best of its abilities; there are utility programs to fix that. Then, you got slow RAM and an integrated graphics unit eating away from the little bandwidth there is. Running the RAM at 133 MHz should improve on that.

Finally, programs like Sandra aren't necessarily accurate for those old machines.

Try CACHEMEM.EXE from DOS. Google for it. That'll give you the real numbers.

 

[BentValve]

The ram wont run @ 133 though I have tried it.

One of the sticks is PC100 and the other is PC133 ..even the PC133 alone wont run @ 133 for some reason.


Its really, really really slow, Sandra may be off but it takes litterly like 12-15 min to complete a single memory bandwidth test!

 

[BentValve]

Peter, Cashemem reports the Main memory speed as 48.2 mb/s read and 50.5 mb/s write....does this look about right for this system?


My Athlon rig on the other hand is about 100 times faster....literally.

 

[Peter]

Socket-7 systems hardly ever got past 100 MB/s on the RAM, and yours is also running the VGA unit from there, so bandwidth is further reduced. Have you been able to check whether the board's BIOS is setting the K6-2 up for best performance? Use a utility like SETK6 to try and improve on this.

133 MHz RAM is way past the chipset's designed speed.

 

[BentValve]

Peter , the BIOS is an HP , other than that its a regular P5S-VM .. 8mb of shared video.

I found the SETK6 but dont know how to use it, I booted with a 98' boot disk and ran the program...some info came up so maybe it just installed itself? I could not tweak anything though.

Anyways I unistalled 98' and re-installed XP again and OCed the CPU to 550mhz ..XP reports me at 543mhz and 184mb of ram. 100mhz is all the ram is going to do.


I noticed that @ 800x600 the performance improves quite abit so Id imagine that if I installed a decent 32mb or so PCI video card that id gain quite a leap in performance.

I am typing from the PC now and it works great..my cable modem works with it too because there is a single USB port on it.

Overall I think this will make a fine back-up PC once I get a video card in it....do you think more ram would help at all? Also does mixing PC100 and PC133 ram hurt anything on these old PCs?

thanks

 

[BentValve]

Peter, its much faster now...
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...8237&enterthread=y


thanks again.


Id add more ram if you think it would help even more, also I will avoid buying a video card it its not going to make a substantial difference..really the onboard video is not bad after the PC started humming along as it should.