[justin66]

> I'm guessing the idea on this was that if you needed that much RAM, the sacrifice of L2 cache was a worth while trade off.

The idea was that nobody in their right mind would at the time populate that particular consumer motherboard/chipset with hundreds of megabytes of RAM because it would be hilariously expensive. If you needed that kind of RAM, you were purchasing a much more expensive workstation anyhow.

By the time 384MB was a merely expensive amount of RAM, nobody would be interested in installing it in a Pentium. Those were the days when Moore's Law was still a very big deal. For that reason the firmware probably never received an update to fix the problem, even if that were possible.

The docs on that motherboard sort of suggest that the motherboard could cache up to 512MB. This motherboard uses the new pipelined burst cache technology with 512K size and the memory cacheable size from 64MB to 512MB. I can't imagine they ever actually tested that.