strange occurance with adding sdram to an old motherboard? any experts out there?

[Cosmic_Horror]

ok, a friend of mine from work run and old P200MMX with win98 (32mb edo (simms)ram etc etc) and wanted to add more ram.

Now the mother board has slots for 168 pin DIMMs (in addition to the 72pin simms) and can run 5v EDO and fast page dimms and also sdram.

Now the motherboard manual says is supports 64M-bit (16M x 4, 8M x 8, 4M x 16) technology dram.



Now the weird bits!


I took over my PC100 64Mb (megabyte not Mbit as above, 8chip single sided) dimm and my 128MB pc133 dimm (16chip double sided).

The slots for dimms had never been used and they were soooo tight.. i had to really force the dimms in...

Second , both dimms only are recognised as having only 1/4 of there ram capacity!

64Mb reads as 16Mb and 128Mb reads as 32Mb!

anyone ever come across this before..?

also the motherboard manufacture is not long online hence no possible way of getting a bois upgrade etc....

 

[DaiShan]

have you taken the simms out? I don't think you can run both at once.

 

[Cosmic_Horror]

motherboard manual states that the simms can be used in connjuction with dimms as long as Dimm2 and simms 1 & 2 were not used togeather (which we didn't)... how ever i will rty it next time i go over...

 

[Cosmic_Horror]

eeek.... chipset is a VIA Apollo VP (not VX sorry)

see http://www.anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.html?i=155&p=15

for more info

 

[Tripleshot]

I had the same problem with an IBM Aptiva POS. I gave up trying, IBM was totally lacking in support,and the customer junked the PC and bought a Gateway.

I am almost positive you cannot run simms and dimms at the same time. Pick one or the other. Look in bios for any pecular settings,if there is any mention at all.

 

[DaiShan]

on that board do you set the fsb via jumpers of bios? you made sure you are running at 66mhz right? I don't think it is going to be able to use double sided RAM either

 

[Cosmic_Horror]

hmm i will have to try taking out the simms and seeing how it goes.... 🙂

the motherboard and most websites about this chipset satate simms and dimms can be run togeather.... (provided the banks that are shared between simms and dimms is only ocuppied by one or the other...

i have searched the bios, just seems to have timming setting (very basic) and they don't seem to much anyway!


just not sure why each dimm only reads a quater of what it is!

 

[bruincal]

i know for a solid fact that you can run both SIMMS and DIMMS together on a motherboard that supports it.. i know because i'm doing it on two systems i have ...

on one system, i have 1 stick of 128 mb SDRAM and 4 sticks of 16 mb SIMMS in one motherboard .... both the BIOS and windows 2000 correctly report the total memory at 192MB .

where you said you had to force the DIMMS in, there's a possibility that you might have damaged or scraped the connectors on the memory sticks?

 

[Jeff7]

I think I had almost that exact same problem, including the tight memory slots, with my sister's computer. It was an old Amptron 8600 motherboard. I put in 2 64MB DIMMs, but it thought there was only 32MB total RAM in the system. I gave up trying DIMMs in it and just gave her 16MB more in SIMM's for a total of 48MB. That board has since been upgraded out to a Super Socket7 motherboard - an Epox board. It works quite well now - for a K6-2 450 system.🙂

Oh, and the board's BIOS was updated, which obviously wasn't a help. I think the last update on the site was from 1997 or 1998.

 

[GregANDTCH]

Some of those boards have 168 pin slots,
but only use EDO Dimms instead of SDRAM Dimms.
Friend of mine had a board that would only take 2-clock memory and not 4-clock.
Of course 4-clock is the standard that survived so his memory is higher than generic memory.
🙁
I tried using some 64MB Sdrams in an Amptron board & it only saw part of them.
I finally gave up & put the Simms back in & gave it away.

Who actually makes the motherboard?

It seems around the time P200's were abundant memory was going through
a transition & there were a bunch of different standards. Everybody wanted to switch
to 168pin slots but couldn't decide between EDO, FPM, SDRAM, 2-clock, 4-clock.
Probably what DDR motherboards will look like a few years from now.
Friends will want you to upgrade their DDR board and you'll have to figure out
the speed (1600,2100,2700,etc) whether it can use NEC memory chips.
Maybe it has to be registered too.

OH Well
YMMV

 

[Cosmic_Horror]

thanks everyone for replying! 🙂

the chipset via apollo vp (see link above) says it supports edo and fp simms and edo, fast page and sdram dimms.

The Dimms slots were very tight... but the pc100 64Mb dimm came home with me and works fine in my system (vai Kt133 , duron 800).

the motherboard is a MB-586VX7 manufactures by Ability (who's webiste no longer exists..)

maybe a super socket 7 motherboard is they way to go...

My mate doesn't want to spend too much.. just adding memory is fine but doesn't want to upgrade everything....


thanks again everyone for your feed back 🙂