Only Half Of Ram Being Used?

[nkm490]

I have a very old system that I really need to replace (my wife would rather have a new couch ). Anyway, I recently bought 128MB of SDRAM that my mobo manual specified would work fine. I installed it but only 64MB is recognized by my system. I updated my bios to the most recente version I could find. I updated the chipset drivers. I swapped the memory all around into different slots (with and without my old memory). Nothing seems to work. Below are the system diagnostics that Sandra finds.

 

Any suggestions would be awesome.

 

nkm490 [email protected]

 

Sandra says:

 

SiSoftware Sandra

 

Chipset 1

Model : VIA Technologies Inc VT82C597/597AT/598MVP Apollo VP3/MVP3 System Controller

Bus(es) : ISA AGP PCI USB i2c/SMBus

L2 External Cache : 512kB Pipeline-Burst Write-Thru

Front Side Bus Speed : 1x 100MHz (100MHz data rate)

Maximum FSB Speed / Max Memory Speed : 1x 100MHz / 1x 100MHz

Width : 64-bit

 

Logical/Chipset 1 Memory Banks

Bank 0 : 64MB SDRAM 2-3-3-0CL new mem as seen by mobo

Bank 2 : 64MB SDRAM 2-3-3-0CL

Speed : 1x 100MHz (100MHz data rate)

Multiplier : 1/1x

Width : 64-bit

Power Save Mode : No

Fixed Hole Present : No

 

Memory Module(s)

Memory Module 1 : Micron 8LSDT1664AG-133B1 110867EF 128MB 8x(16Mx8) SDRAM PC133U-333-5412 (CL3 up to 133MHz) (CL2 up to 100MHz) new mem as reported by mem

SiSoftware Sandra

 

Processor

Model : AMD-K6

[Eva_Unit_0]

Hmmmm...that is very strange. I have seen this issue a few times before in the forums, and it usually is a matter of the chipset being too old and not supporting the proper density of ram. My guess would be that your new stick uses high-density ram, and your board can only properly address low-density. To be honest, I don't think there's really anything you can do about it, short of replacing the mobo. (and in that event, you'd want ddr anyway, lol) You've updated the bios...updated the drivers...not sure what else to try.

 

And come on man...you can spend a LITTLE and get a new rig, lol.

[Shadowfactor]

ya the mobo isnt suporrting the ram , get a little for a Amd Xp system and get DDR ram

[Agallion]

u can get a athlon xp cpu mobo and ram for under 300 bucks EASY probably under 250

[Morpheus903]

I think the bottom line here is that your motherboard won't recognize more than 64MB per bank. Also, if it's as old as I'm thinking, avoid PC133 and go for PC66/PC100 RAM. You might have gathered some of that from all the posts. I just wanted to help clarify what others were saying.

[nkm490]

Now that I look at things a little more closely I think that you are right about my mobo not being alble to handle my memory configuration.

 

Straight out of the manual I see:

 

SDRAM : 1Mbx64 (8MB), 2Mbx64 (16MB), 4Mbx64 (32MB), 8Mbx64 (64MB), 16Mbx64 (128MB)

 

Sandra says that the new memory I installed has the following configuration:

 

128MB 8x(16Mx8) or 8Mbx128 (128MB)

 

The only way I could ever get 128MB from one stick on my current mobo is if it was double sided.

 

I wouldn't say my problem is solved, but at least now I know why it's not working as I expected.

 

Thanks for your help!