Greetings everyone!

I'm currently doing battle with a PcChips M915i clone motherboard. From what I gather here, they are very ornery boards but excellent performers if you can get them working right. I'm fortunate enough to have real, socketed cache in mine.

Anyway, according to the specs for this board, it will tolerate 256 MB of RAM. So I went ahead and ordered 4 64MB sticks from eBay. I made sure they were 5v, FPM sticks prior to buying them.

The board will POST fine with all the sticks installed, but gives me fits on the memory count. Sometimes the screen will go black except for the memory counter and part of the Energy Star logo, other times it will go to 128mb and give me a memory error. If I get beyond that, the BIOS will either recognize 128mb or the whole 256mb, and continue with the boot process. I get varying amounts of improvement by removing sticks of RAM. It's happy with one 64 MB stick, works half the time with 2 sticks, and beyond that all bets are off.

At the moment I only have 256k of cache. I am waiting for the 1mb chips and 512k tag chip to arrive from China. Could that be why the motherboard is acting up, due to the incorrect cache? Or is there a BIOS setting that maybe I could play with? Perhaps a hardware conflict?

It's worth noting that the board worked fine before I upgraded the memory. Prior to that I had 64MB installed, composed of 4 16MB sticks.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

-Tim