BIOS Updates forum

Hello,

I've got a Coppermine Celeron (566MHz) FCPGA processor in a PCChips M767V board using a Slot 1 to Socket 370 converter (slocket). Yes, I know - shame on me for using a PCChips motherboard It's the only available motherboard I have at the moment.

The board boots up fine (recognizing the chip as a "Pentium III 600MHz") and boots into Windows fine. Except, the L2 cache is disabled for some strange reason! (only the 32KB L1 cache is "reported")

I thought this might be because it's a slightly older board, so I found the latest BIOS for it (dated 04/02/99) and flashed it - no difference. Apparently the "great" fellows at PCChips didn't bother to add Cu-mine support in the BIOS

Is there anything I can do here, other than finding a different motherboard? I've looked through the CMOS setup menu just in case and have not found a "L2 Cache Disable" setting There were no problems with an older 400MHz P2 Celeron processor.

Help!

This calls for checkup5:

http://www.digit-life.com/articles/cpuerrata/

In the case of AMI BIOSes, there's no other alternative.

Thanks for the link. Let me see if I understand it right: I have to use the utility checkup5.exe to upgrade the CPU errata microcode stored in the BIOS. All I have to do to perform this is run checkup5.exe in a clean DOS enviroment?

Exactly. Remember to use the updated pep.pdb file included in that page.

Are you sure I need to use that file? I glanced at the readme for checkup5.exe and it said the external database was no longer required because the latest version is included in the executable.

Good you've read. Last time I resorted to that site was a couple of years ago. OK, so you now know what to do

Ok, I'll let you know how it goes

Checkup5 ran fine and applied a revision update, but it didn't help my problem. 32KB is still the reported size of my cache.

Maybe my motherboard just doesn't like CuMine processors?

A thought: Is it possible that the L2 cache is actually being used, but just not reported? The computer seems to run fast enough (not much HD swapfile activity w/ 192MB of RAM). If the L2 cache was *really* disabled, how noticeable would the slowdown be?

Try CPU-Z and/or AIDA32

They might show L2-Cach enabled or disabled

I have a small old DOS-program checking memory activity and it will give out a graph .
You should see a drop at 32K and at 128K if L1/L2 are anabled and only at 32K if L2 is disabled

Denniss - I have that program...cachegraf. The graphing is pretty cool.

You can also use cachechk or maybe ctcm, etc...

Or CCT386.

L2 can be activated with Powerleap utility

http://www.powerleap.ca/Downloads/PLeap ... _0_0_1.exe