Intel al440lx board ram

Hi...

It's virtually certain that you can buy whichever you find that's most readily available at the best price and the machine will use it just fine.

Note though, that faster than pc133 is a whole different thing, you can't buy ddr??? and use it, can't even plug it in.

Why not see if you don't have a neighbor or friend who uses pc??? memory, borrow a stick, and try it?

If all else fails, I have a couple of sticks of pc133 here (128 and 256) that I no longer have use for that I'd be happy to loan you one of.

Take care.

Ken

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Usually PC100 will work just fine, sometimes PC133, the problems you run into have more to do with the electrical layout of the memory than the speed it's rated at though, particularly in the larger capacities. Your best bet is to find one that you can try before you buy or return if it won't work.

The limitation is that the memory controller on the board will only see memory chips that are up to a certain density. For example, if you have a 256MB RAM stick, it may have 8x256Mbit, or 4x512Mbit, or 16x128Mbit chips on it. 64Mbits was a common limitation on older boards, meaning the biggest stick you could put in there would be 128MB if it was the normal type with two sides and 8 chips on each side. If you put a bigger stick in there, the board would only see part of it.

As long as you do not get bitten by the memory density, I can think of two other issues:

- Cacheable RAM area. This only matters on boards with L2 cache external to the CPU. Since your PII processor has L2 cache on the CPU, it does not have a realistic cacheable area limit so you can install as much memory as the board will take. Older TX boards could only cache 64MB of RAM, and the cacheable range of Super 7 boards was usually limited by the amount of L2 cache installed on the motherboard. If you installed an operating system that loaded at the top of memory like Windows, it would possibly be out of the cacheable area and thus run very slowly, helping to negate the benefits of having more memory available.

- I have heard anecdotes that using e.g. PC133 memory in a PC66 motherboard will fail because the refresh interval on the PC66 memory controller is much longer than that on the PC133 controller. If the RAM was designed with a shorter refresh interval in mind, the slower refresh interval may allow things to fall out of RAM. I have not been able to corroborate this personally, but it may be something to investigate.

Another thing to watch out for is that the memory may be 5 volt, while AFIK all 100 and 133 RAM is 3.3 volt. It's easy to tell, the SIMMs look the same, but one of the notches is in a slightly different place.

Geoff.

How much PC66 do you need? I have some stashed away somewhere and might be able to give you what you need. I won't be needing it any more.

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