Archived from groups: alt.sys.pc-clone.dell (
More info?)
You have a good bet there, Tom. That's exactly what Kingston did with its
RDRAM, lending some confusion for all of us. Everyone else including Samsung,
Toshiba, Infineon, Elpida and NEC marked each stick with its own individual
capacity and, typically, the number of chips on the stick. If you have two
128MB sticks, one marked 128/8 (8 chips) and the other 128/4 (right! 4 chips),
they will not work together as a matched pair. Kingston's RAMBUS modules are
nothing more than relabeled modules manufactured by Samsung. The alumimum cover
over the chips is even stamped www.samsung.com .
RAMBUS was a good concept ruined by the greed of the RAMBUS company in throwing
lawsuits at every memory manufacturer for infringement of its patents. IMHO,
RAMBUS did not act in good faith by contributing its patented materials to JEDEC
(an industry electronics consortium), ostensibly for public use. Finally, Intel
pulled the plug on RAMBUS support, because its 850 chipset was the last one to
support RAMBUS memory. When Intel pulled the plug, there went the future of
RAMBUS in the personal computer business.
Even a 2GHz Pentium 4 loaded with identical RAMBUS modules in all for memory
slots is a pretty fast computer... Ben Myers
On Mon, 19 Sep 2005 22:38:53 GMT, "Tom Scales" <tomtoo@softhome.net> wrote:
>
>"yanni" <ian.gaither@gmail.com> wrote in message
>news:1127163927.105456.16790@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>> hi,
>>
>> I recently bought a dimension 8100 loaded with
>> 2 x 256meg (kingston ktd-dm800..don't know whether it is ecc or not)
>> and
>> 2 x 64meg (samsung 800-45 ecc)
>>
>> This should show 640, but only 384 is showing. I guess this suggests
>> that 1 of the 256 is dead? Is there any way of knowing which one or
>> whether upgrading my bios would make a difference?
>>
>>
>> Strangely, when I remove either both 256 or both 64, the pc will not
>> boot...screen remains black after powering on.
>>
>> Thanks for your help...
>>
>
>I'd bet that Kingston used markings that reflected the TOTAL for the pair,
>since they are only useable as pairs. That would mean you have 2x128 + 2x64
>= 384. I would be shocked if the machine would work at all if ONE of a pair
>of modules was dead. Also, the machine will not boot at all if any of the
>sockets are empty. As mentioned, there was a special dummy module that had
>to be installed (again in pairs) if any sockets were empty. RDram was a bad
>idea that didn't last.
>
>Tom
>
>