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What's the MHz Kenneth?

Forum Motherboards & Memory : Memory - What's the MHz Kenneth?

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Anonymous   10-17-2001 at 07:11:59 PM

I'm confused about adding/upgrading SDRAM.
I once thought that the MHz rating was a max figure and that you could use a 133 DIMM in a board that has a frequency of, say, 66 MHz and it would work at 66MHz but it would work.
But my confidence in this working "knowledge" has been shaken by an IBM Aptiva machine that seemed to work fine but occasionally had registry errors after adding a PC133 DIMM.
The BIOS counted it correctly and didn't complain so I thought I was good to go. But Win98 would complain on boot(occasionally) that there was a problem with the registry and needed to be rebooted to correct it. Took the memory out and registry errors went away.
Question: Is there a rule of thumb or general guidline when approaching memory upgrades?
I do a lot of these for other people and most don't keep their MOBO documentation.
Trial and error is OK except when you Err!

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bum_jcrules   10-17-2001 at 09:04:00 PM
- 0 +

Do you know if the DIMM you put in is parity or non? If you put in non with a board that wants parity you could get errors. You might be able to disable it through the bios.

Tell me what happens....

I like to take my wife out for a romantic dinner…Sometimes I let her <font color=red>Supersize it!</font color=red> :lol:

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Anonymous   10-18-2001 at 04:29:30 AM
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Are you saying that your understanding is the same as mine - DIMM is DIMM?
I'll let you know what I'm able to find out about the Aptiva needing parity but still would expect the BIOS to complain about using the wrong kind of Ram.

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Anonymous   10-20-2001 at 07:35:55 AM
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If you don't mind playing in the BIOS, there are 2 things you should double-check

1. Make sure the BIOS is using SPD to determine the timing settings for the RAM
2. Ensure that you have the latest BIOS revision.

Just for fun, what does your config.sys file look like? Any mention of
DEVICE=HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=EMM386.EXE
this is completely unnecessary from Win95 on.

<b>Go AMD or go home.</b>

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Anonymous   10-20-2001 at 05:35:12 PM
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What is SPD all about?
Do you have a response for my original question? Should 133/100 MHz SDRAM DIMM work in a 66MHz board?

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Anonymous   10-20-2001 at 05:38:58 PM
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I don't have access to this machine anymore so I can't tell about the HIMEM.SYS, etc. but I've seen these get carried over in other Win9X installs.
Does it cause problems that you've seen? I thought these were ignored if not needed.

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reasonablevoice   06-12-2008 at 07:02:06 AM
- 0 +

Ok, this is super old but if anyone ever stumbles across this in the future and is working on a legacy machine... This sounds like bad memory. Run memtest to confirm, then swap out with good memory. It had nothing to do with the speed.

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