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Atrend ATC-6130 (Award 4.51) Which kind of RAM memory?

Posted: Tue Aug 13, 2002 12:36 pm
by benzocaine
I have an Atrend ATC6130 Motherboard with three 168p DIMM sockets. According to the manual it can have 8-386MB (3x128MB). If I buy a 128MB PC133 DIMM will it work with this board? What is the difference between PC100 and PC133? If a PC100 DIMM is the same price as a PC133 one, is there any reason why I would buy the PC100 instead of the PC133?

Also, is it possible to insert any combination of DIMMS into the motherboard? All example combinations in the manual are one step away, if you see what I mean. They combine 8MB with 16MB, 16MB with 32MB, 32MB with 64MB and 64MB with 128MB DIMMS but never e.g. two eight MB DIMMS and one 64MB. I currently have 2x32MB RAM which is not enough. Is it possible to add one 128MB DIMM or will I have to remove the old ones if I do so.

I have also heard that some motherboards are actually slower with 128MB RAM than other memory capacities. Is this true? Does that mean it is necessary to buy two DIMMS in order not to lose speed?

Re: Atrend ATC-6130 (Award 4.51) Which kind of RAM memory?

Posted: Tue Aug 13, 2002 2:39 pm
by NickS
benzocaine wrote:I have an Atrend ATC6130 Motherboard with three 168p DIMM sockets. According to the manual it can have 8-386MB (3x128MB). If I buy a 128MB PC133 DIMM will it work with this board? What is the difference between PC100 and PC133? If a PC100 DIMM is the same price as a PC133 one, is there any reason why I would buy the PC100 instead of the PC133?
I did once come across an Intel chipset (LX?) mobo which would not accept faster RAM than PC66, but that is most unusual.
Also, is it possible to insert any combination of DIMMS into the motherboard? All example combinations in the manual are one step away, if you see what I mean. They combine 8MB with 16MB, 16MB with 32MB, 32MB with 64MB and 64MB with 128MB DIMMS but never e.g. two eight MB DIMMS and one 64MB. I currently have 2x32MB RAM which is not enough. Is it possible to add one 128MB DIMM or will I have to remove the old ones if I do so.
I have never had to remove the old ones.
I have also heard that some motherboards are actually slower with 128MB RAM than other memory capacities. Is this true? Does that mean it is necessary to buy two DIMMS in order not to lose speed?
The motherboard cache (usually known as "Level 2" or L2 cache) has a chip called the "tag RAM" which keeps tabs on what main RAM has been accessed through the cache. If you have more RAM than the tag RAM chip can keep track of, some (all?) of the RAM will not be cached thorugh the motherboard cache. However, all RAM will be cached by the processor chip's own Level 1 cache. Some processors have a certain amount of L2 as well. For many applications the extra RAM gives a greater performance boost than the reduction in caching removes.

As a guideline, if you have 512Kbytes of motherboard cache, 128 Mbytes or 256 Mbytes may be cacheable depending on whether you are using write-back or write-through caching (this also depends on your CPU). As I'm having difficulty downloading the 6130 manual, I can't suggest anything more.

Thanks!

Posted: Tue Aug 13, 2002 4:14 pm
by benzocaine
Thank you! Your reply was most helpful.

If I'm not mistaken, less than P100 is not commercially available, and P133 is the same price as P100. Additionally, P133 is said to be backwards compatible so a computer designed for P100 will still be able to use it (at suboptimal speed).

I'll try buying a P133. If it doesn't work, I'm sure I can reclaim the buy.

Once again, thank you!

Posted: Tue Aug 13, 2002 5:09 pm
by NickS
A word of warning; some chipsets and motherboards which claim to support 3 DIMMs have trouble doing more than 2 DIMMs.

I just bought the 128MB DIMM and so far it works perfectly.

Posted: Tue Aug 13, 2002 6:42 pm
by benzocaine
I just bought the 128MB DIMM and so far it works perfectly. The problem I had before was that with a 40GB HDD and only 64MB RAM the computer constantly was reading and writing to and from the disk buffer, which took rather much time despite the speed of IBM's disks. I sense that the computer goes much faster now.

The motherboard and the BIOS had no problem recognizing the additional 128MB RAM, even though I did buy the P133 DIMM -- it was actually cheaper than the P100!. We'll see how stable it will be... So far no problem. If it fxxxes up I will tell you guys.

/Benzocaine

Posted: Sun Aug 25, 2002 11:50 am
by Rainbow
NickS: I have a PC Chips M715 board with i440LX chipset and it worked fine with 128MB PC133 DIMM.

Works fine!

Posted: Sun Aug 25, 2002 6:31 pm
by benzocaine
This is a follow up.

As described above, I bought one 128 MB 168 pin SDRAM P133 DIMM for my Atrend ATC 6130.

It worked fine, so I went to the same store and bought another one. Unfortunately, my old 64MB RAM were two 32MB DIMMS so I had to remove one to fit in the other 128MB, but now I have almost 300MB of RAM and I have had no problem at all. My computer runs much faster now, because it doesn't have to cache memory as much as before.

To sum up, there is no problem adding one or two P133 128MB DIMMS to an Atrend 6130 Motherboard.

Posted: Sun Sep 01, 2002 1:17 pm
by NickS
Rainbow wrote:NickS: I have a PC Chips M715 board with i440LX chipset and it worked fine with 128MB PC133 DIMM.
The one my friend had problems with was a genuine intel mobo - who knows what they put in their BIOS ? :? We also had a DIMM with a wrongly-programmed SPD which worked fine in other boards when we used manual settings, but confused the intel mobo which counted more memory than SPD stated....

Posted: Sun Sep 01, 2002 5:37 pm
by Denniss
The problem with older chipsets like i440LX/BX is not the speedgrade PC-133 or 100 as they are backwards compatible .
I my information is correct both the 440LX and the BX have a memory density limit of 128MBit means max 256MB sticks (doublesided with 16 memory sticks and 16x8 internal organisation - or 128MB single sided with 8 memory chips) .