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- I recently bought a 256 meg card to add to my rather anemic 64 meg card. The system booted funny and hung the first time, but after that it runs normally, only -some programs- much faster. Hooray! - I noticed that the motherboard has three memory slots, and 256 meg sticks are common. How much RAM can my system (Win98) manage? Can I go buy another two 256 sticks and use them? The guys at the custom computer shop said they didn’t really know, and that they didn’t know what the limiting factor was, considering you can (-fork over major bucks and-) get 1 Gig+ ram cards nowadays. What’s the limit, and what detimines it, the OS or the board? - MC
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I’d say as long as you’re plugging in identical memory units, there’s no restriction to what the OS will accept. So yeah, 3*256 MB will work nicely if your board can handle it.
your bios might limit you (it probally does) also your speed increase won’t be as much going from 256 to 512 as 64 to 256
I agree with K2dave. With memory enough is as good as it gets (mind you I have half a gig on my work machine and you aint getin’ none of it :D)
MC, Kingston.com is a great site for checking out how much RAM a machine can handle, and what kind of RAM as well.
It’s already been said though, but, The more the merrier, and 256 seems fine. I have 320 on my PIII 500MHz, and 128 on my PowerPC8500(Mac), I have no problems with any of that.
Win 98 is limited to 512M.
:cough:
You know the new Mac G4 can handle up to 1.5 GB or ram, right?
And it has gigabit-ethernet standard. And a DVD-Burner. And dual-processors. And, at 733 Mhz, kicks the PIII’s butt. And has 4 expansion slots. And 2 FireWire ports. And USB on top of that. And the new keyboard and mouse. And wireless networking. And…
:cough:
All operating systems will have an upper limit to the amount of RAM they can address; it is inherent in the architecture. I must confess I don’t even know what the Mac OS limitation is (the gig and a half mentioned by sdimbert is a machine limit not an OS limit), and haven’t a clue about Unix or MS operating systems. Naturally, it is nice to have a ceiling far beyond what actual boxes are likely to be capable of holding for the practical lifetime of the OS version. (If I were designing an OS for now, I’d specify an even terabyte. Mac System 6 got pretty cramped towards the end with its 8 MB limitation, and I believe MS DOS came onto the scene with 640 K max addressable RAM, which seemed like a lot more in the early days than it did at the end of the DOS era).
Anyway, memory addresses need to be stored in a finite number of digits’ worth of address-space description field, and for the same reason that 7-digit phone numbers won’t supply a sufficient number of telephone numbers to a big city (thus requiring additional area codes), the digits reserved in OS code for handing address space limits the amount of RAM it can address.
Your motherboard manual will tell you how much RAM you can use. A newer board should be able to use 3 X 256M. At least, I have an ABit BE6-II and that’s what it will do.
You casn get some nominal improvment if you have all the slots filled. But make sure what the BIOS can support and the memmory is matched.
John
I’m not sure, but I don’t think Smitty’s win98 512M quote is correct. The OS will have a limit to the amount of RAM it can use, but that limit should be orders of magnitude greater than the limit imposed by the motherboard/bios.
A few other posters are commenting about matching RAM, but not all motherboards require this. SDRAM does not need to be installed in pairs, though mixing and matching speeds and CAS ratings is not a great idea.
Since your motherboard has 3 slots, it shouldn’t require any sort of RAM size matching. But also as mentioned above, enough is as good as it gets.
oh, and sdimbert, for the purchase price of that system you described, I can build a PC that will kick it’s candy colored ass. 
If you post what type of machine you have, specifically, model number at least, it might be easier to help you figure out what the cap on it is, ans what you might want to look out for. 
[hijack]
sdimbert, wonderful machines arent they?
until the power switch fails and your modem gets fried…
…hehehe… happened to two of my G4’s at work. Damnit.
[/hijack]
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- Not to rag on Macs but, -I never owned a Mac, heck, I can’t even remember ever using one, but PC’s cost less and have a wider support base for products (both hardware and software) and technical assistance. The college I go to also teaches almost all their CIS courses on PC’s too, which was no small factor in my purchasing decision. [They do have Macs for a couple classes but I don’t know what.] Welcome to McReality -billions and billions served.
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- Of all the Mac features mentioned, the only one I might actually use is the DVD-burner, but for what I’d want to do, a CD burner would do just fine. No-name RW-CD drives are going for $150 online right now and dropping fast. All that other stuff I would probably never use, except for USB, which my system already has.
- Also, um, , , I seem to remember running across a motherboard somewhere that supported four P II processors. It was priced at ~$230, IIRC, and fit inside a regular cabinet and used regular memory, cards, etc. The rub was that although it would do regular stuff just fine on a single CPU, to take advantage of them all the software had to be written specifically to utilize such a system. Out of curiosity I even posted a question here at the time asking about which programming languages and OS’s included standards for multiple-processor support. I admit I don’t know jack about Mac OS so I can’t comment on exactly what that second processor is actually doing most of the time, but it may very well be “not much”; most programs cannot be arbitrarily split into separate concurrent tasks. ~ Pretty soon I’m sure (if you look) you’ll find a PC motherboard that supports 4 P III’s, and you’ll still be able to put it together for less than what a single G-4 costs, DVD-burner aside. - MC
OK… bring it on!
I do believe that Windows has 4GB of addressable memory space. Whether or not you’ll actually notice any speed improvements above around 512 remain to be seen.
Jman