More RAM, More Problems

A retro PC builder saw Quake performance drop after upgrading RAM on a late-1990s machine.

Benchmarks fell from about 44 fps to 33 fps, even after swapping hardware and software setups.

The cause was a 430FX-era motherboard that could only cache roughly 128 MiB of memory.

Once RAM exceeded that limit, more work ran from uncached memory and the system slowed down.

Removing the extra memory restored the expected performance.