p3v4x with 4 ram slots being used problem

[Guest]

Anyone ever hear of a problem with the asus p3v4x and using all 4 ram slots? i read something along time ago, but i forget what it said, anyone else using this board with all 4 ram slots being used?

i have 3 sticks of 128 pc 133 hundai ram and 1 256 pc 133

is mixing the 128 w/ 256 a bad thing? ive never heard of that being a problem before.

thx

 

[jlanka]

Only thing I can think of is to make sure the big one (256) is in the first slot.

 

[stable]

I'm not sure how good of an idea it is to mix memory. Our experience has been that while on the outset things may run okay, it is not untypical for problems to occur.

The real issues are:
1) Chip speed. The ns rating of the chips must be the same on all sticks in the system.
2) CAS rating, the CAS rating of all sticks must be the same, or set to the slower 3-3-3 if not.
3) ECC Versus NON-ECC Versus Registered Versus EDO Versus VCM. All memory sticks must be of the same type.
4) Bus Speed. PC-66 Versus PC-100 Versus PC-133. All sticks must be the same.
5) Bus support. Some motherboards only support a mix and match by using certain slots for certain sticks (as mentioned in the above reply).
6) Parity between single sided DIMMS and Double sided DIMMS.

I will mention, (for what it's worth) in the case of the P3V4X (Rev 1.02), the manual indicates that the motherboard only supports Unbuffered memory and a 256MB stick may be mixed with 128MB RAM.

Please note that there are a lot of variables to consider, hence my comment about considering how good of an idea it is to mix.

A good way to tell if everything is okay is to download a good utility / benchmarking software package and run the memory tests in a continuous loop 100 times. If the memory passes all tests, you should be fine. If it crashes or fails the test regularly, you should avoid the mix.

Steve Benoit

Stable Technologies
'The way IT should be!'

 

[Guest]

Purchasing memory for my P3V4X I got a good low price on 4 sticks of SDRAM. So naturally, I filled all four slots with these 256 Meg SDRAMs and immediately got a message to free up some memory so Win98 could boot. The error included some rediculous change in the Config sys. All I did was remove the Autoexec bat and Config sys files from the bootup sequence, and it has operated fine ever since.

I guess this will work if you can give up these files. By default Win98SE doesn't install them, but I have some older 16 bit programs that I will load when I can. This config doesn't use them.



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