Re: 384mb RAM installed but 57mb recognized at bootup..........huh ?
Courtney Thomas said:
> Nate,
>
> Thank you for your interest.
>
> This motherboard is about 4 yrs old. I don't remember the brand but the
> manual indicates that it is a M5SAB, if that helps. The RAM is Kingston
> which I bought yesterday at Office Max.
>
> The documentation indicates pc100 but I assumed that since pc100 was
> required then surely something faster would work, apparently incorrectly.
>
> The AMD CPU is 450mhz.
yes that sounds like a memory density problem. One of the boards I
mentions is powered by an AMD K6-3 400. Most of the boards back in that
era needed 16 megabit memory.
Faster RAM should work, the board will just run it at 100Mhz, but since
there may not of been any systems back then which used 16 Megabit memory
that could use PC133 memory it may not be possible to find any modules
which are 133Mhz with a 16 Megabit density. It is very difficult to tell
by looking at the memory module to see if it is 16 megabit or 32 megabit,
some clues(this is by no means fool proof)
64/128MB Chips = 16Megabit will be double sided, 32Megabit will be single
sided
256MB/512MB Chips = 32Megabit will be double sided. 16megabit may be double
sided and double height(the memory stick being twice
as tall as a normal stick with ~36 memory chips on it
compared to ~18 on a normal chip). These Double-height
memory chips are not compadible with many boards, since
most boards don't support more then ~18 chips per memory
stick. One of my Intel L440GX+ motherboards has 2 such
double sided/double height 256MB memory sticks. It's one
of the few boards I've encountered that can run them.
note in all cases when I say Megabit I'm referring to the little chips
on the memory stick not the memory stick itself.
nate
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