Knowledge is power! Don't trust your OEM for memory limits!

I

imzjustplayin

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jan 24, 2006
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If you want to find out the maxmium amount of memory your system can have, trust your chipset manufacturer and check to see how many slots you physically have available. Thanks to my curiosity I checked out the chipset of an older Pentium laptop I have, has a 430TX chipset it turns out. This laptop comes with 32MB of and According to fujitsu the maximum memory upgrade is to 96MB (add one 64MB SODIMM). But according to Intel, the 430TX chipset on this laptop has maximum memory of 256MB. So I took a 128MB SDram module and installed it, now this Pentium I laptop has 160MB of ram. :D

I've had this happen to me before numerous times..

My vaio desktop, says maximum 384MB of ram but according to Intel, the 440LX chipset in there supports upto 512MB of ram; so I took 1 256MB module and 2 128MB modules and installed them, worked like a charm in there. On my Vaio Laptop it says maximum 256MB of ram the chipset is a 440BX, Intel says it supports upto 1GB of ram got two 256MB modules for it and now has 512MB of ram Dell Desktop said maximum is also 384MB of ram checked it out and it had the 440BX chipset now I can put 3 256MB modules for a total of 768MB of ram.

That said, I did encounter a newer sony vaio with RDRAM that technically should support upto 2GB of ram but vaio said maximum was 512MB of ram. Tried using 2X256MB memory modules and it was a no go, had to use 4X128MB modules which literally limited it to 512MB of ram. I think it was a stupid bios issue, most issue I have are due to crappy bios'. Reason I say this is because I took a standard 24X CD rom drive for a Dell inspiron, replaced it with a DVD rom, booted up the system, hotswapped it and it worked beautifully. But when I rebooted, dell told me it would refuse to boot due to it not having a "dell" device in the bay..
 
Hey man, I'm in the process of upgrading my laptop too.

I have a HP laptop that currently has 1GB of memory. On HP's website it says 2GB is the max. I want to put 4GB of memory (2 x 2GB) in it (I know it will only see 3.5gb but I don't care).

How do I check what chipset to I have? Can you show me the way? Thanks, I have a dv2035us.

Ok it says i945GM from CPU-Z.

And I found this info page! Click Here

I guess that means I'm going to buy 4gb memory now.

But please someone clear it up for me will y? Thanks!
 
Hey, I used Google too! T_T Except that maybe mine information wasn't right or I dunno. Hehe, thanks mate.

Wait so it doesn't really depend on the motherboard? Because that was my thought when I was expanding the memory of my desktop.

So I guess it depends on:

Memory Slots
Chipset

and what else?
 
Also depends on the memory modules you use, certain memory modules may simply not work with the board giving the impression that the system doesn't support more ram when it's really the modules at fault.
 
A good example would be my old laptop, a Sager 5690. Apparently, it's *very* sensitive to the timings of the ram. I initially tried using ram than was rated better than the original ram and the laptop refused to boot, ended up having to return them and find someplace that sold the higher latency ram that does work.
 
Hmm, thanks for the advice. I'll only buy 1 2g first and if it works non top for a week at full load then I guess it's safe to say it works?
 
P4rD0nM3 said:
Hmm, thanks for the advice. I'll only buy 1 2g first and if it works non top for a week at full load then I guess it's safe to say it works?
Click to expand...
memtest 86 it! That older fujitsu laptop with the 430TX chipset supports up to 256MB of ram but because it came with 32MB on it's own and only has 2 dimm slots, I tried putting one 256MB module from the vaio that goes up to 512MB ram and while the system did boot, I was suspicious and so when I loaded memtest 86, it worked fine until it got to around 160MB of ram where it then continued to error. So it just goes to show that while the system may boot with it, it may or may not have safeguards to stop it. Sometimes the safeguards are unnecessary or just for marketing purposes and sometimes they're not.
 
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