A 72 pin simm stick of memory is non parity if it has only 8, oh, I forget what you call them…
Bits, is the word you’re looking for, I believe.
OK, but if there’s only 8 of them, then the memory chip is non parity, right? Because you’d need 9, the extra being the parity bit, right?
Right. Parity simms will be indicated on the chips with a number like 32 x 9. Non-parity will have x 8.
Crap, I’ll bet that’s it. A while ago, I got a socket 3 motherboard, because, for a hobby, I wanted to supe up a 486. But after installing it, I couldn’t get it to boot up. Well, It made a sound like it was counting the memory, but the screen was a complete blank, no graphics at all, and it never bothered trying to check the hard or floppy drives. After pulling out the motherboard, I saw that the memory is non parity. I’ll bet that’s the problem.
It should have at least gone through POST and given you some error beeps or something. I don’t think POST needs system RAM to complete, but I could be mistaken. Try it without the RAM installed, and if you get the same behavior, you’ve got other problems. I’ve booted up mainboards bare (no RAM, drives or expansion cards) before for diagnostic purposes, and I’ll get POST beeps.
I might just give that a try. Thanks.
The number of chips can tell you the parity, but 9 is not always the magic number. Some can have 3. 2 for memory and 1 for parity. Lot’s of combinations possible. Even if it has 8 chips, there might be a circuit to “fake” parity so that hardware that requires parity is fooled.
And then there is “2-sided” SIMMs…
Wouldn’t that make them DIMMS?
It’s not the number of chips that makes the x9 or x8 designation, ftg, it’s the internal arrangment of the chips’ circuitry that does it. Yes, there are 3-chip and 8-chip SIMMS, but that’sa different matter.
Did you mean to refer to some other user in this post instead of me? I don’t see your point at all w.r.t. my post. This is pretty much along the lines of what I said.
I just reread your post. Nevermind. I had misread the first bit as “The number on the chips…” instead of “The number of the chips…”, which is what you wrote. Sorry 'bout that.