Alan Jones wrote:
>
> I have a BP6 with dual C300A/450 CPUs, 128M Micron PC100 RAM, ...
> I have an Antec KS-188 case with a PP-303 300W power supply.
>
> When I bought my the initial package about two years ago I wanted the ECC
> RAM, but it was expensive and harder to find at that time. Now I want to
> add 256M, because it is cheap. A minor consideration is that space is very
> tight when using the lower drive bays. I don't think I can use the third
> RAM slot at all. I understand that all PC133 RAM will work fine at 100Mhz
> FSB speed, but will they also work at 66M? Will it work with my existing
> PC100 (CAS2) RAM? Should I just discard the 128M PC100 RAM and use a
> single 256M ECC DIMM? I'd appreciate recommendations for RAM expansion,
> and perhaps even specific brands or vendors.
>
I'd highly recommend getting *PC-100* SDRAM, because of some bad
experience
with PC-133@66.
While my BP-6 used to work fine (yes, really...) w/640 MB PC-100 (2x256,
1x128), I made a mistake to upgrade to the maximum 768 by adding 256MB
_PC-133_. My local dealer didn't have PC-100 at that time, so I was
persuaded to get a PC-133 module. It was/is a "no name" one - but
anyway,
my opinion is, that module doesn't define proper 66 MHz timings in its
SPD EEPROM (at least there were none in the output of "decode-dimms.pl"
of the lm_sensors package, and none in Windows SW "ctSPD" by
German magazine "c't").
With that module, I experienced total system crashes quite frequently -
at least once every other day, say. Those weren't like the "typical"
BP6 "lock-ups", more often spontaneous reboots than total freezes.
This happened in all OSes installed on this box - several Linux
systems, W95, NT, FreeBSD, SCO Unixware.
Even though I soon regarded the new memory module as the culprit,
I waited too long to get it refunded/exchanged by the dealer (sigh -
cost me some $330 then...).
After buying another PC-100 module, all is fine again - haven't had
a single crash in almost half a year...
Instead, this module is in another box with a socket 7 MoBo, were
there are "block in free list clobbered" errors and GPFs seldomly,
some once a week.
Thus, IMHO this is strong evidence that PC-133 doesn't work well
in a 66 MHz system - but perhaps the situation is not that bad
with Kingston, Infineon or other well known brands ?
I'll stick to max. PC-100 for 66 MHz systems, as a consequence.
Juergen
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