about 2 years ago I made this post, and many of you had so much helpful information to give me I could barely assimilate it all.

New Retro PC. Need help with some hardware decisions.... (Aptiva)

I figured I'd make a new post and update on the build.

For the most part it's just been sitting and I've tried a few games on it the way it was, and didn't do much other than getting the 3D Rage II card and Audigy 2 card working in Windows 98 SE.

I finally had some spare money and bought the upgrades I wanted for it. I've installed an Pentium 200 MMX and a 256 KB COAST into it and both seem to be working and detected (I can only assume, I haven't tested the cache with cachechk yet).

I've also installed one of the Gotek floppy emulators and I really like the thing. convenient and pretty cool looking honestly. I didn't get a manual with it, so I have to figure it out, but my Windows 11 PC keeps saying the USB drive isn't formatted, so I haven't been able to transfer any files with it. But then again, that doesn't matter too much I suppose since there are other ways to transfer files that can be much larger. Still it will be great, especially for game boot disks. I admit, it's an unnecessary upgrade, but I just did it because I wanted to.

But I have one problem with my Ram upgrade and I don't know what to look up to find a solution.

The PC shipped with 2 sticks of IBM branded 72-pin SIMMS at 8 MB each.
At some point when the computer was our main computer at home, my dad installed a 64MB kit, and the computer had a total of 80 MB of ram, and this is how it's been configured since probably 1998. I purchased another 32 MB kit hoping to max out the ram the board can handle at 128 MB. I don't even remember where I read that, so I hope I'm not remembering wrong.

anyway here is the issue:

Every stick of ram seems to function. I have to have them installed in Pairs or the machine wont post, something I would have known ahead of time if I had read the wiki, but I figured that part out at least.

I have 6 total simms to swap around and play with.
2x32 MB HP sticks marked as "SEC KMM5328004ASW-6"
2x32 MB NEC sticks (the ones my dad purchased back in the day) The modules are silkscreened with "LGS GM71C17403CJ6 9735 KOREA"
2x8 MB IBM branded sticks that came with the PC

I have tried all of the 32mb sticks in as many combinations as I care to, they all post the computer with 2 installed, mix and matching the HP and NEC SIMMS, it all works at 64 MB of ram. The machine also boots, no matter what combination of 32 MB SIMMS are installed alongside the original 16 MB for a total of 80.

But no matter what. when I install the 4 32MB SIMMS. the memtest spills over and goes all the way to 144MB and then crashes the computer. If I skip the memtest. the computer just doesn't post.

I can manage to get into the BIOS though, and at one point, before I understood that they need to be installed in pairs, I tried with 3 simms for 96 MB, and whether or not i have 3 or 4 SIMMS installed, all 32 MB. the BIOS tells me I have 144 MB of ram installed. and I have no idea why. Sometimes I get an error saying that memory timing is off, but I have no idea how to set that. There is a setting in the bios that seems to be defaulted to 60 ns, but I wouldn't know the first thing about adjusting that to match the SIMMS. I would assume that maybe something is wrong with regards to the simms matching, but I can run 64 MB of ram in any configuration of 2 simms. So I don't know whats up.

Outside of all the Soundcard and Videocard advice from the other thread, this is really the only thing holding me up at the moment. I suppose I could just keep it at 80MB and keep the extra 2 sticks for spares. but this stuff seems to be bomb proof and I feel like the whole computer is going to give out before the ram does. but who knows.

I'm also thinking of picking up a 3Com ISA card so i can just ditch USB entirely and use Windows 95. But that's something I'll figure out later.

Thanks for any insight.