Thread by @RetroTechChris

I went to visit my friend Bill yesterday, and he gave me "just a few" DIMM and RDRAM modules 😂. Shall we explore a bit and upgrade some PCs? Methinks yes. Time for a 🧵

The first order of business was to sort a bit. I looked up a fair number of chips to get this far, and also got a little lazy and "guessed" on a few. But we can see we have PC100/133, DDR, DDR2, and Rambus modules here, in varying capacities!

The first thing I am going to do is set the Rambus aside, since I can't test that! This will also probably be true for the DDR2 (and actually DDR3 as well) memory, but that's ok. And yes, those blanks are for populating unused Rambus slots in a motherboard.

I'm going to start out testing four PC100 128MB modules in the Rustbucket PC. It'll be a nice upgrade from its currently installed 64MB of memory. It does support a max of 1GB, but even 512MB is super overkill for this beast.

Memory was detected, and about 2 hours later or so, we made it through one round of MemTest86+. I'll call it good (sorry for the "poor" MemTest86+ picture, I don't know what is going on with this monitor today!)

Next up we are going to toy with a PC in the basement that has an ABit AB-BX6 2.0 motherboard. In theory, we should be able to get this up to 1GB. But I am not sure that is going to happen...

Why would I say that? This motherboard is PICKY! Or maybe it is the chipset. You can't put in these single-sided 256MB chips that you see here and get the full capacity (currently that is what is installed, and they detect as 128MB)

The good news? It looks like these double-sided Centon modules are getting fully detected! I popped two in, along with another 256MB module that got detected. Now we're talking!

Booting up Windows '98, we can see the memory is detected too, not that it wouldn't be!

Let's run MemTest86+. Oh no.. well, shoot. Looks like this one Centon module might be possibly bad.

I swapped in a 128MB PC133 DIMM to see what we'd get and oh my did things get worse!

(I swapped a few more modules in, and we will check on that later). Meanwhile, back upstairs with the modules I pulled from that system, testing in the Rustbucket PC, and it is equally picky with these 256MB modules. Could this be an Intel i440BX limitation?

Let's switch gears for a minute and upgrade my eMachines T2341 to 2GB of memory. We will use some DDR 400 modules. Looks like they got detected right away!

I went through the list of OSes, trying them out now that we went from 1GB of memory to 2GB of memory... my gut told me that all would pass but one. And I was right...

Which one failed? Windows 98 SE. Well, fortunately there is a patch for the Win9x versions to fix systems with large amount of memory. And it works great. Problem solved!

I'm going to let MemTest86+ run for a while, and also clean up the desk 😂

Oh, while cleaning up the desk, I came across this module. It's by far my favorite 😂. We'll have to test it out another day and see exactly what it is.

Anyway, the desk is clean, and the ABit in the basement is holding strong. It's time for me to call it a night, but we will check back on things (and test some more) soon. I have four other machines to upgrade as well. Thx for following along!

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