Re: Possible dcache BUG

[Barry K. Nathan]

On Fri, Aug 20, 2004 at 04:08:50PM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Friday 20 August 2004 14:13, Marc Ballarin wrote:
[snip]
> >Is ECC checking for L2 cache enabled in your BIOS?
> 
> There isn't a switch for that and as near as I can tell, no L2 cache 
> on this board, only the L1 in the cpu.  If there is an L2, then 
> memtest86 can't find it, and I don't see any chips that look like 
> seperate memory.

The L2 cache is *on the CPU chip itself*. Any CPU recent enough to
physically fit into an nForce board has the L2 cache on the CPU itself.
I think the last Athlons to have separate L2 cache chips were the Slot A
models, and even then, the L2 cache chips were still on the CPU module
and not the motherboard.

> Memtest86 may not know howto enable it if its an 
> nforce2 option.  Whatever cache shown as switchable in the bios, 
> turning it off makes a very sick bird out of the machine, like a 
> 33mhz 386sx?

Yeah, disabling the L2 cache on a modern CPU makes it really slow. But,
it's still a useful troubleshooting option...

-Barry K. Nathan <barryn@xxxxxxxxx>

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