To much memory

[FDUSMC]

I just bought the Abit KX7333 and having serious memory problems. I have two sticks of Samsung PC2700 ram, one 256 and a 512. Each stick works fine individually but when I try them both together I get not enough memory errors as well as I'm not able to play any games. Is their a setting I'm missing or do I just have a bad mobo? Need to know before warranty runs out. Thanks in advance for your replies.

[heyou_21]

if you are using win95 win98 and i think winME... they will not recognize more than 512 meg of ram.

[FDUSMC]

That explains it. Thanks.

[Johnny Knoxville]

ME sucks. that should explain it better :)

[ninthebin]

is that board good - cos I was looking at getting it...

[FDUSMC]

The only thing I don't like about it is the the max VCore Voltage which is 1.85v. Another thing is the temp readings I'm getting. On my old board (giga 7vrxp) I was getting full load temps (folding) 36d. On this one it reads 45d. Which scares me because my system is H20 cooled. Probally just different temperture gauge in socket. All in all no problems with the board.:)

[ninthebin]

funnily enough the first board I was looking at was the ga-7vrx (not the vrxp though) - but I liked the idea of an Abit mobo more... :D

[FDUSMC]

Good choice! I had read Toms article and rushed out and bought it. RMA'ed that sucka!

[ChillPhatCat]

Win 98 SE supports more than 512... My brother's P4 system is running '98 SE with a gig and it is all recognized.

[macklin01]

Hmm, I had 512 installed on my wife's with ME. It seemed to be the worse
for it. When I limited it to 256MB, it seemed to improve in terms of
performance, hdd thrashing, etc. Is there a "sweet spot" for ME?
(Personally, I'd like to move her up to XP Home) -- Paul

[diehrd]

ALL 9X SYSTEMS will support more than 512 megs of ram...But in order for it to work you need to go to microsofts knowledge base and look for the article on this issue.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q253912

I had ME,98,98Se all using 768 megs of ram...at the time on this site it was a hot topic of debate and actually was fun with all the different people chiming in on one side or the other of ya can run 768 or no way ya can ...those where the days

[macklin01]

I bet that 98SE really flew with 768 MB of RAM, given a proper configuration!!! -- Paul

[macklin01]

What vcache settings did you use? Any recommendations for 512 mb? Thanks! -- Paul

[Seal]

yeah the kx7-333 absolutely rox, i got mine 2 days ago and i love it, i got it after buying it to build a friends computer, its insanely overclockable and there are lots of options for every single thing you can think of.

My (not OC'd) cpu temperature (MBM5) with my ultra cheap air cooled fan with crappy thermal grese is only 39 deg c full load! If i get a decent fan and some as3 i bet i could get it down to the low 30's full load. oh yeah and the chips a xp2200.

i bet you lot are all envious of my temperatures, but i suppose i'm cheating cos my ambient temps are only around 18deg c (i live in england and its starting to get cold agen!)

i'm getting water cooling soon too because i can cool all my chips down silently.

[diehrd]

9X operating systems will have problems with more than 512 megs of memory,there is a way around it from microsoft .

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q253912

[Arkaine23]

There's also a bios setting to set a stronger DDR signal for both banks- bank 1 = dimm slots 1 &2, bank 2 = dim slots 3 &4. When you use say slot 1 & 2, it can help to turn the signal strentgh up. I think Abit put these options in (aside from being incredibly thoughtful) because they realized that as the board nears escape velocity, err I mean 200 FSB, accessing multiple sticks of memory without errors becomes difficult. Now if they just sold lead-lined Abit T-shirts and hats so that we're safe from what happens when our CPU's start getting to such a high frequency that they start to emit microwaves.

[macklin01]

Hmm, well, I have my wife's HP with Celery 800 running on 512 MB of my old SDRAM. My (her) current settings (mostly running windows/office apps, no gaming):

[386 Enh]
PageBuffers=32
ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1
MaxPhysPage=20000
MinPagingFileSize=131072
MaxPagingFileSize=131072

[vcache]
MaxFileCache=491520
Chunksize=2048
namecache=4096
directorycache=96

How do those settings look? Thanks! -- Paul

[Spec_Ops2087]

although I do not know much in settings...that seems to be ok....but I know NOTHING about cvache or even what it is:p

But to answer your earlier question, Paul....all the 9X O/S's have a sweet spot...to what I know it is 256MBs...everyone says they get the best peformance right there...and with XP it is 512MB for the sweet spot...and probably with the new OS that will come out whenever it will be 768MB...and so on and so on....

Hope this helps




Spec

[macklin01]

Hi, Spec!

Thanks for the response. Hmm, well, I thought I had tweaked ME successfully on my wife's machine, and indeed it was pretty racy, but after a bit too much of folding w/ iexplore and norton, it turned up blue screen low memory errors. I ended up limiting it to the first 256 MB of memory in msconfig. :( Too bad -- I had had so much hope!

Thanks again for the input! -- Paul

[Tecumseh]

Depending on the version of Windows, some people have been
able to use the RAM made off-limits to the OS as a high-speed
RAM Drive. This way you can use all the RAM. Check out
the Cenatek software RAM-drive. There are others.

[macklin01]

Huh, that's the first time that a ramdrive has ever made sense to me. (And the Cenatek folks are nice, too.)

One question -- Right now, I use msconfig to limit winME to seeing the first 256 MB of memory. I assume that to use a RAMdrive, I need it to see all 512MB. Aside from removing the earlier said limit, do I need to make any parameter changes?

Thanks for the great idea! :) -- Paul

[Tecumseh]

The answer is complex is depends on the OS. W2K and WXP
use a different kernel than the Win98SE or WinME.

On the W2k machines you can use memory the systems
can see or use memory the system cannot see but the
kernel can access directly.

For the Win98 machines the system must see all the ram.
If you put if off limits you can't use it.

Cenetek was upgrading the ramdrive software the last time
I checked 6 months ago. I don't know what the current status
is now.

I was hoping that they had a common feature base for all
Windows machines, but I don't know if they succeeded.

They have a pretty big FAQ on their site.

No parameters except the size of the ramdrive need to be
made. Check it out!

[macklin01]

Will do! :) Thanks -- Paul