Mmm no, I would not advise filing it to fit, though someone on here may correct me on that since I don't have much knowledge about buffered ram (especially edo in dimm format). Keying is usually there to stop bad things from happening. Just that the ram says IBM on it doesn't mean it's meant to work in that machine in particular.

I'd recommend just getting unbuffered, my understanding is that buffered isn't needed in home use, and generally is somewhat slower so people for the most part avoid it

"For home use"?

Buffering isn't a data reliability feature like parity/ECC, it's an electrical feature used to reduce the load on the memory controller and so allowing it to drive more chips. That's pretty fundamental to board design, so I'm surprised to see a claim that a board is able to accept both buffered and unbuffered.

OP, where did you read the claim that your system accepts both buffered and unbuffered memory? Because your DIMM slots are keyed for unbuffered and that normally means it will only accept that kind.

Usually when they did that, from about 1999-2004ish, they meant you could use 512 or 768MB unbuffered, but more than that had to be buffered. So had the drive strength for 2 to 3 DIMMs/ranks, but more than 3 needed to be buffered.

BitWrangler wrote on 2025-10-02, 03:14:

Usually when they did that, from about 1999-2004ish, they meant you could use 512 or 768MB unbuffered, but more than that had to be buffered. So had the drive strength for 2 to 3 DIMMs/ranks, but more than 3 needed to be buffered.

There you go. I think amongst others 440bx boards were like that, or, "officially" anyway. In practice they could often handle more without needing to use buffered but obviously reliability may suffer

Sorry, in my little experience with this type of ram I got confused in my head and thought that buffered/unbuffered was something like ecc/non ecc where if you install an ecc ram without the mainbord requesting it, it simply treats it as if it were non ecc

I am not sure if you can mix unbuffered and buffered though, never came up for me. The ECC thing can be weird too, there's some consumer boards that are set up to refuse to work if they detect ECC, intel being the primary offender, but sometimes if you put in a non-ECC stick with them, they work. As non-ECC of course.