First post, by jarreboum
Context: a Soyo SY-5SSM motherboard (SiS530 chipset) with a K6-III+, three slots of SDRAM with three 256MB sticks. The first 8MB are shared with the onboard video processor.
After installing Windows 98 and toying with it a bit, I noticed it kept giving me blue screens when I was installing big games, and I had the screen froze when I moved a single heavy file. I realised it was probably due to some faulty RAM module so I took them all out and tested them one by one with MEMTEST86+, then tested them in pairs, in every combination possible on every slots (I only did one pass for each, in order for the whole test not to take a full month). No error was given. When I tested all three, it almost instantly gave me errors, starting at 000200c8cdc - 512.5MB. I shuffled the three RAM sticks around, just to make sure, and it gave me the same errors. At the third test this time, but at the same address.
I'm down to two possibilities: either the motherboard doesn't like having more than 512MB of RAM, or it doesn't like having all three slots fitted with sticks. I can't test the later as I only have 256MB sticks around. I'd hate to buy some just to test that, though I'd do it if I really have to. The motherboard is designed for up to 768MB of RAM as per the manual.
The big question now is, how do I fix this?