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PB450 motherboard went from 2MB vRAM to 512KB vRAM

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First post, by bjwil1991

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One of my Packard Bell PB450 Firehawk motherboards decided to drop the video RAM from 2MB (1MB ZIP RAM upgrade chips installed with the 1MB onboard video RAM) to 512KB. I've never had onboard RAM for a video card do that before and I have a general question here. Can a bad video RAM IC cause the video RAM to drop to 512KB and not get the other 1MB RAM to work properly? One of the chips was warmer than the other, so my guess is a short in the NEC 424260-70 DRAM FPM chip itself or something else.

I'm planning on buying replacement RAM chips, but before I do that, I am seeking advice and more knowledge if a bad video RAM chip can cause significant video RAM dropping from 2MB or so to 512KB.

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Reply 1 of 1, by Tetrium

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I've only had a similar experience using desktop DDR. I bought 2x1GB DDR-400 for an upgrade, but apparently it was of shoddy made quality as after a while I could see Windows recognizing only 512MB of it. A bit later the system crashed and I'd have to let the RAM cool off before it would work again and recognize all the ram. I ended up returning this RAM and replacing it with 2x1GB Corsair iirc, which worked flawlessly in the same system.

The system was a Barton 3200+ running WinXP.

It's not what you're looking for, but I don't know, nor have I ever heard of, a somewhat similar experience.

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