Sphere478 wrote on 2022-12-02, 18:24:
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Okay, so these should work for test?
Yes, they are 16MB 5V FP SIMMs that definitely should work
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Another possibility, 128mb simms may not have existed back then. I hope they routed the address lines for 512mb. Gonna suck if not.
I suppose if they detect and work as 64mb I can just order two more.🤔
To be honest, you're getting well ahead of yourself if you're already spending significant money on new components before you've verified that the board isn't completely FUBAR... I'd recommend getting it minimally running with two SIMMs and no cache, and only when that works start investing in things to pimp it.
Assuming the board does work, the question is not whether 128MB SIMMs existed when this board was made, but rather whether the board - or more specifically the chipset - supports them. According to spec, i430NX does NOT support 128MB SIMMs - it supports max 256MB, but that's using a lot more than two SIMMs. I've not seen it do more than 32MB per module, so depending on what your BIOS thinks of out-of-spec stuff, those big boys will either cause POST to fail with a RAM error, or will POST, but with significantly less capacity available, most likely 1/4 of their nominal value (as only able to address the first 16Mb of every 64Mb chip).
Slight caveat: Intel was repeatedly more conservative than necessary with their RAM support specs. In the late 1990s multiple chipsets were listed as supporting max 64Mb chips when in practice they could handle 128Mb. It wouldn't be unprecedented for other chipsets to alos do that. But I would be rather surprised in this case.