argh! I only have 128mb of pc100.... I'm two steps behind the curve! Add on a lowly 500mhz processor, another step or two, and of course, a rage pro... ok everyone, get up and take a one mile jog backwards!
Win98se will run on 32megs, but it's not recommended, and believe me, it's unstable and slow. I had this for over a year on a k5-100 system with a whopping 32megs of 60ns edo ram! Programs inside windows work okay like this, but the windows interface, and start up is slow as hell.
A freind had a cheap budget system having 98se 32mbpc100 and a k62 450. It sucked, tucked an extra 64mb under the hood, and it was a decent system. Other than the crappy sis 6320 video, (6320? I think), it was a decent system. The video was sooo bad I was proud to own a rage pro. My rpro on a k5-100 with 64megs under win2k out did his k6-2 450 with 32megs under 98se with unreal tournament! Anybody see why ati kicks ass? the sis 6320 card is a current model!
From playing with win me on my system, I don't think I'd like to try the burn with under 64mb
BTW: By expanding the memory with on-board add ons, they could add it like a second level cache. Think, the main video ram is like a l1 cache, and agp is like l2. If you add a second onboard memory, work it like l2, and the agp as l3.
Also, data interleaving is a possibility. Using two dimms, the data can be distributed between the two evenly, giving twice the bandwidth. Using two pc2133 dimms now gives you 533mhz of 64bit bandwidth, comparable to vram in use on many midline to top line cards today. You could also look at it as 266mhz 128bit bandwidth, very very wide. And the interleaving doesn't have to add any latency, so the ram would have a 2 or 2.5 clock latency.
[This message has been edited by Meat_PoPsicle (edited 11-21-2000).]