Pentium II board only sees half RAM

Pentium II board only sees half RAM - any ideas?

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First post, by Lostdotfish

Posted on 2024-06-07, 17:58

Lostdotfish Offline

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I have 3 of these 256MB SDRAM sticks. In my Pentium III 370 board, they are recognised correctly.

In my Pentium II board, they only get recognised as 128MB each. Any ideas why? Are they just incompatible or is there something I can do in the BIOS to get it to see them correctly?

M366S3253CTS-C7A-lg__68284.1676029105.jpg?c=1

m366s3253cts-c7a
https://ram-co-shop.de/256-MB-SD-RAM-168-pin- … 6S3253CTS-C7A_1

They're single sided.

Motherboard is this - https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/abit-ab-va6

Reply 1 of 5, by mmx_91

Posted on 2024-06-07, 18:38

mmx_91 Offline

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Hi, your problem is that later SDRAM modules tend to be high density modules, whereas chipsets from that era only supported low density.

I'm not an expert on this, but I find a 'good' rule considering 128 or 256MB suitable as long as they are double sided. This works at least for me.

Single sided modules show either half the capacity or are not recognised at all, depending on module and board I suppose.

Reply 2 of 5, by H3nrik V!

Posted on 2024-06-07, 22:32

H3nrik V! Offline

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Does that also apply to a ViA chipset? I always thought it was a BX thing ..?

If it's dual it's kind of cool ... 😎

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Reply 3 of 5, by leonardo

Posted on 2024-06-07, 22:49

leonardo Offline

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H3nrik V! wrote on 2024-06-07, 22:32:

Does that also apply to a ViA chipset? I always thought it was a BX thing ..?

It's an old vs new chipset kind of thing. Although ViA had some later chipsets in the market when 440BX was still popular, the board in question might not have one of those.

440BX remained popular because despite it's age, until DDR-SDRAM or RD-RAM would become available and affordable, it was actually faster than Intel's later chipsets were with regular SD-RAM, and because most BX-based boards ran happily at 133 MHz FSB, despite that being out-of-spec...

[Install Win95 like you were born in 1985!] on systems like this or this.