Rubenerd

Have you ever heard a phrase that hit your nostalgia centre with such devastating force that you had to pause the video or conversation just to get your bearings again? This often comes in the form of an advertising jingle from my childhood, embarrasingly enough for me.

It happened again recently. It would shock you to know I was watching a video about a 486 motherboard restoration, when the host expressed relief that it had “real cache memory, not those fake chips”. The words sent me back to Sailor Moon, iMacs, and Seinfeld. I hadn’t thought of this issue for years, and likely would have forgotten completely.

While most of our CPUs today contain their own L2 and L3 caches on die, it was common on early 32-bit x86 architectures for this cache to reside on the motherboard. You could get a nice performance boost by adding additional cache memory, or replacing existing ICs with better timings.

You can probably see where this is going. Disgraced former manufacturer PC Chips released a series of cheap motherboards at the tail end of the 486 era that were found to contain… Seinfeld bass guitar riff… fake cache chips. They didn’t have the capacity or silicon reported on their shells, and offered no cache whatsoever.

Casual Retro Gamer on YouTube did a video in which he desoldered and snapped a fake cache chip on his board, and found they were literally hollow plastic with metal legs! They didn’t even try to hide this scam.

CRG: Replacing fake cache in the 486 build

Worse than even the physical trickery, the BIOS ICs on these boards were even doctored to deliberately misreport the amount of available memory! CRG was able to demonstrate this by using a third-party cache check tool on boot, which reported a complete lack of L2 cache.

This is why I don’t buy the caveat emptor argument that buyers should have known they were being scammed from a cheap board, as I’ve read on certain forums. It’s one thing to be given a board lacking certain features, but there’s zero excuse for lying about them. It fascinates me how certain people will always place the burden of responsibility on the customer, and not the businesses engaged in deceptive, unethical, or irreseponsible behaviour. But I digress.

Along with those Newtronics read head issues plauging certain Commodore 1541 disk drives, I see these sorts of boards for sale on auction sites and I want to tell people to avoid them! It’d suck to spend all this money on a retrocomputer build, only to realise your parts aren’t what you expected. Or I suppose you could do what CRG did and take it as a challenge to swap them with real cache chips.