Sphere478 wrote on 2021-10-28, 15:52:

Will it support 512mb sd sticks?

Officially, no, and the manual looks a bit different from the website:

Both the website and the manual say the 168-pin slots accept up to 256 MB SDRAM DIMM, yet the former says all three slots can have 256 MB, resulting 768 MB max, while the latter says the max RAM is 256 MB only.

The MB was not designed for WinXP and beyond anyway; 256 MB would be sufficient for Win9x.

I have this board somewhere, as far as I remember my 512MB RAM sticks were adressed as 256MB each, but there were reports about 512MB sticks being recognized correctly.

It all depends on the revision of the ALi 1542A1 Northbridge that can address up to 4GB of RAM. Depending on the revision (D,E,F,G,H) between 128MB and 4GB(!) of RAM can be cached.
I assume the BIOS will play a role here also.

What´s the revision of the Northbridge on your board?

majestyk wrote on 2021-10-28, 17:12:

I have this board somewhere, as far as I remember my 512MB RAM sticks were adressed as 256MB each, but there were reports about […]
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I have this board somewhere, as far as I remember my 512MB RAM sticks were adressed as 256MB each, but there were reports about 512MB sticks being recognized correctly.

It all depends on the revision of the ALi 1542A1 Northbridge that can address up to 4GB of RAM. Depending on the revision (D,E,F,G,H) between 128MB and 4GB(!) of RAM can be cached.
I assume the BIOS will play a role here also.

What´s the revision of the Northbridge on your board?

Not sure, I don’t have it yet. But the OP pic I believe is the actual board in question but image quality is lacking. Board is revision 2.2

dormcat wrote on 2021-10-28, 16:55:

Officially, no, and the manual looks a bit different from the website: […]
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Sphere478 wrote on 2021-10-28, 15:52:

Will it support 512mb sd sticks?

Officially, no, and the manual looks a bit different from the website:

GA-5AA_manual.gif

Both the website and the manual say the 168-pin slots accept up to 256 MB SDRAM DIMM, yet the former says all three slots can have 256 MB, resulting 768 MB max, while the latter says the max RAM is 256 MB only.

The MB was not designed for WinXP and beyond anyway; 256 MB would be sufficient for Win9x.

I’m wondering if maybe I find a 32 chip dimm that it may work..

What are you running that needs more than 64MB of RAM?

I had my mother setup with one of those with a K6-2+ @ 500 running Windows XP in 2004/2005 and it was okay for her.

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-10-29, 04:04:

What are you running that needs more than 64MB of RAM?

😀

Because I want 1gb of ram on my socket 7 these builds never make sense, I do it for the fun!

Repo Man11 wrote on 2021-10-29, 04:18:

I had my mother setup with one of those with a K6-2+ @ 500 running Windows XP in 2004/2005 and it was okay for her.

One o f these motherboards? Did you ever overclock it? I’m hoping to play around with 133mhz fsb

Supposidly, one of these was used to do the world record socket 7 clock of 800 something mhz on a k62+

I overclocked the CPU from 450 to 500 (I tried to go a little higher, even decapped the CPU, but 500 was the limit) but I didn't play with it much because it was a computer for my mother to use for websurfing and email.

I can confirm, in revision 3.2 the board takes 512MB of SDRAM modules and loads them in full. Unusable for me, since only 128MB can be cached with the K6-2 CPU - I have a revision of the E chipset.

Not sure, I don’t have it yet. But the OP pic I believe is the actual board in question but image quality is lacking. Board is revision 2.2

Even from that picture I can tell, that it has external TAG chip, so it's early chipset revision and only 128 Mb RAM can be cached.

Sphere478 wrote on 2021-10-29, 04:40:

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-10-29, 04:04:

What are you running that needs more than 64MB of RAM?

😀

Because I want 1gb of ram on my socket 7 these builds never make sense, I do it for the fun!

64MB - what is this?! That's for some kind of calculator? And why settle for a meagre 1 GB when you can have full 1.5 GB 😁
Sadly I don't have any 1 GB modules for "proper" testing, but I hope it will be enough 😀 My board is ver 3.2 and it was quite fun testing it. I only had to enable write combining via k6dos.sys, otherwise write performance in Speedsys was completely crippled. Now the performance is as it should be and RAM is fully cached with K6-2+.

elcrys wrote on 2021-10-29, 17:41:

Sphere478 wrote on 2021-10-29, 04:40:

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-10-29, 04:04:

What are you running that needs more than 64MB of RAM?

😀

Because I want 1gb of ram on my socket 7 these builds never make sense, I do it for the fun!

64MB - what is this?! That's for some kind of calculator? And why settle for a meagre 1 GB when you can have full 1.5 GB 😁
Sadly I don't have any 1 GB modules for "proper" testing, but I hope it will be enough 😀 My board is ver 3.2 and it was quite fun testing it. I only had to enable write combining via k6dos.sys, otherwise write performance in Speedsys was completely crippled. Now the performance is as it should be and RAM is fully cached with K6-2+.

I’m blown away at the fact that you got it to do 1.5gb!!

Holy crap!

And you make the suggestion that it can do 3gb?!?! I’m so going to try that!! Lmfao

Okay, so something that I ran into once was on 430hx I was able to get it to show 768mb of ram but it didn’t actually have the ability to use it. It would pass a memtest 86+ test but when I tried using it for windows, os installers, programs, etc it would glitch as soon as it tried to write something above 512mb

Can you fill that ram up with unique data and confirm it’s stable? Because some benchmarks won’t detect that problem

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2021-10-29, 09:56:

Not sure, I don’t have it yet. But the OP pic I believe is the actual board in question but image quality is lacking. Board is revision 2.2

Even from that picture I can tell, that it has external TAG chip, so it's early chipset revision and only 128 Mb RAM can be cached.

Do you have more information on the various revisions?

I thought they all had a external cpu cache and internal northbridge cache

Sphere478 wrote on 2021-10-29, 17:53:

I’m blown away at the fact that you got it to do 1.5gb!! […]
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elcrys wrote on 2021-10-29, 17:41:

Sphere478 wrote on 2021-10-29, 04:40:

😀

Because I want 1gb of ram on my socket 7 these builds never make sense, I do it for the fun!

64MB - what is this?! That's for some kind of calculator? And why settle for a meagre 1 GB when you can have full 1.5 GB 😁
Sadly I don't have any 1 GB modules for "proper" testing, but I hope it will be enough 😀 My board is ver 3.2 and it was quite fun testing it. I only had to enable write combining via k6dos.sys, otherwise write performance in Speedsys was completely crippled. Now the performance is as it should be and RAM is fully cached with K6-2+.

I’m blown away at the fact that you got it to do 1.5gb!!

Holy crap!

And you make the suggestion that it can do 3gb?!?! I’m so going to try that!! Lmfao

Okay, so something that I ran into once was on 430hx I was able to get it to show 768mb of ram but it didn’t actually have the ability to use it. It would pass a memtest 86+ test but when I tried using it for windows, os installers, programs, etc it would glitch as soon as it tried to write something above 512mb

Can you fill that ram up with unique data and confirm it’s stable? Because some benchmarks won’t detect that problem

If that isn't super, then I don't know what is 😜

Btw, with 32 chip SDRAM you mean those with 16 chips on each side that are twice as tall as standard ones?
Because I always kinda wondered what those were used for. I know I have one or two in my stash somewhere, but they were low density (so total memory size was maybe 128MB or so, so not of particularly much use).
The ones I had iirc weren't registered or anything.

My modules are 2x KVR133X64C2/512 + 1x noname. 8 chips on each side.

Sphere478 wrote on 2021-10-29, 17:53:

Can you fill that ram up with unique data and confirm it’s stable? Because some benchmarks won’t detect that problem

I wasn't planning to, but I patched Windows 98 for RAM above 512 MB and everything seems to be running fine. I tried memory benchmark in Sandra, then 3D mark 99 and now is running Prime95 (blend - lots of RAM tested) which should detect any abnormalities. So far it's OK.

This little program runs in windows to tell you how much ram you can allocate if you'd like to test I beleive under 9x up to 512mb can be addressed per program but might require tweaks to registry for large program support.
Out of memory error is not usually fatal but might bring desktop to a crawl until terminated.
Perhaps allocating say 256mb per instance of this app at once to reach the systems true real world limitations of full allocation though per instance usually 512mb max.
http://www.xteq.com/products/rama/

I will test it because Prime95 doesn't go over roughly 500 MB no matter the settings.

EDIT:
OK, Xteq RAM Alloc works, now I was able to fill the "bottom" with 1024 MB allocation and Prime is running in the rest.

I thought they all had a external cpu cache and internal northbridge cache

Apparently internal TAG RAM in E revision is borked.

There are some G revision motherboards which had external TAG too, but to my knowledge all Gigabyte boards had only 512 Kb L2 cache.

elcrys wrote on 2021-10-29, 19:47:

I will test it because Prime95 doesn't go over roughly 500 MB no matter the settings.

EDIT:
OK, Xteq RAM Alloc works, now I was able to fill the "bottom" with 1024 MB allocation and Prime is running in the rest.

I'm impressed. Obviously that memory patch isn't just a hype.