High Density SDRAM and Socket7 Boards

[kaesile]

I know most BX-based motherboards don't support high density SDRAM, but is it all right to use it and just write off half the stick as unreadable? Right now I've got a 256 MB in my Super7 board, and it's being read as 128 MB. I figure that 128 is better than nothing, but is there any performance penalty for doing this?

Thanks for any input.

EDITED to add that I ran HCI Design's MemTest on the system for 24+ hours and it returned no errors.

DieHardware, could you explain a little more why only being able to read half the RAM chip would hurt performance? Would it be better to take out the 256 MB stick (which is being read as 128) or just leave it in and hope the performance gains of having 128MB more RAM will offset any performance hit?

The stick seems to be running at CL2 w/o any problems.

 

[DieHardware]

Originally posted by: kaesile
I know most BX-based motherboards don't support high density SDRAM, but is it all right to use it and just write off half the stick as unreadable? Right now I've got a 256 MB in my Super7 board, and it's being read as 128 MB. I figure that 128 is better than nothing, but is there any performance penalty for doing this?

Thanks for any input.

Having only half the RAM could (and probably will) hurt performance.

 

[redbeard1]

I'm not sure of performance issues, but I've had mixed success using them in that situation. I have occasionally ran into odd errors when using high density ram in some old boards. Others it didn't bother, and they seemed to work fine. To be safe I quit using them, and stuck with low density.

 

[aka1nas]

I think it was also highly dependent on chipsets as well. I.E. the ALI and SIS chipsets from back then were pretty shoddy(I know, they were all I had for my first few computers) compared to a 1st party chipset or even the 3rd party chipsets from today.