Well, I finally got a motherboard that works :) Its a Iwill ka266 with ddr ram and 3.3v agp. Now I have the option of running an agp 5500 instead of limiting myself to a pci.

I installed a 512mb stick and started it up. Windows was running very slowly. Glquake took forever to load also. When I checked windows it showed only having 16mb. I have 2 sticks of 512 and 2 of 128. After swapping sticks from 512/128 in every different combination. I came to the conlusion that its recognizing both 512 sticks as 16mb. It recognizes the 128 sticks correctly.

I have a total of about 278 mb of ram even though 2x125 and a 1x512  stick is installed. lol

Does anyone know why it would do this. The 512 sticks are pc2700.

Thanks in advance.    ;)

Sound like you enabled memory gap 15-16MB option in BIOS. Try disabling it. It might help. Also try putting only 512MB chips inside and playing with memory options in BIOS. Does the calculation of memory size at boot display the size correctly?

RAM might also be incompatible with that particular MB. If that's the case - tough luck. :-/

elfuego wrote on 22.04.09 at 13:16:54:

Sound like you enabled memory gap 15-16MB option in BIOS. Try disabling it. It might help. Also try putting only 512MB chips inside and playing with memory options in BIOS. Does the calculation of memory size at boot display the size correctly? RAM might also be incompatible with that particular MB. If that's the case - tough luck. :-/

A local shop actually game me 2 sticks of ddr 256 single sided ram, and it recognized those without a problem. It seems to have something to do with single and double side.

But, I ordered a faster cpu and installed it. The motherboard didnt recognize it. When I put the thunderbird back in, I forgot to put the heat sink on. :-[  It didnt even post. I think I fried it. Then, as I was swapping memory sticks, a contact came off of one of the sticks and I didnt notice. When I turned it on I saw two small lights on the ddr slot, on the bottom and top(might have been small sparks???).  ::) Not going to well for me. haha.

So I broke out two of the sdram motherboards that I bought. A Epox 8kta2 and a aopen ak73(a). They both boot without a problem. And I can clock the newer processor I got up to 1.5g(posting anyways).

What would you guys think about running a v5500 agp on a Sdram system? Would the v5500 be fast enough for the system to be the bottleneck? Thanks in advance.    :)

sb306 wrote on 29.04.09 at 06:13:02:

What would you guys think about running a v5500 agp on a Sdram system? Would the v5500 be fast enough for the system to be the bottleneck? Thanks in advance.    :)

Im quoting my own message, I know. ;)   I installed the sdram system with 1024 megs and the cpu running at about 1.35ghz. I tested quake 3 at 1024x768 32bpp and details on high. Along with glquake at 1280x1024 and 32bpp. All the results were within a tenth of a frame of one another. So it doesnt look like a big difference.

I thought if anything quake3 would have made a difference.

On a side note. pci vs agp 5500. AGP 5500 Quake 3 fps were about 10 fps higher across the board than the pci.  Glquake had the same results. But the difference was about 4 fps across the board.

Quake 3 details high
1024x768 bpp32
no anti-aliasing 5500@185mhz
PCI=53.8
AGP=63.2

Glquake 1280x1024
bpp32
no anti-aliasing 5500@185
PCI=89.4
AGP=94

Running Glquake at these specs with the 5500 at 160mhz ended with 92 fps. Raising the 5500 up to 185mhz ended up with 94 fps. It looks like the board isnt a bottleneck as far as glquake is concerned. So I think I might stick with the sdram board.   ;)

The only thing I had to do was adjust the max and min ram cache sizes in the windows.ini system file for the extra ram.

sb306 wrote on 29.04.09 at 11:33:07:

The only thing I had to do was adjust the max and min ram cache sizes in the windows.ini system file for the extra ram.

Can u explain what exactly did u do?

elfuego wrote on 02.05.09 at 12:35:16:

sb306 wrote on 29.04.09 at 11:33:07: The only thing I had to do was adjust the max and min ram cache sizes in the windows.ini system file for the extra ram. Can u explain what exactly did u do?

Heres the forum thread that I found on the issue.

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/win98/t1193850234

When I was trying to run Glquake windows would say "not enough free memory. Quit one or more programs" etc etc. Even though I had nothing running on the taskbar. Changing these settings fixed the problem. I didnt have this problem with 768 mb. It only happened when I had 1024 mb installed.

^^ Thanks!

I fixed the problem in another way - I limited the RAM via msconfig. So, after you changed the min and max cache - can windows still utilize the whole 1024MB of RAM or not? Can u test it in Sandra or similar?

elfuego wrote on 03.05.09 at 19:46:43:

^^ Thanks! I fixed the problem in another way - I limited the RAM via msconfig. So, after you changed the min and max cache - can windows still utilize the whole 1024MB of RAM or not? Can u test it in Sandra or similar?

Im not quite sure if it was or not. Windows recognized the full amount in the windows sytem tab before and after I modified the system.ini file. Ill look around the web and see what I come up with. Btw, I was running win98 se.

The more I look around, the more Im finding that people had alot of issues with over 512mb of ram. To the point of Windows not even booting.

I ran 768 with no problems at all. The only time I had a problem was starting up Glquake with 1024mb of ram. And that was only because it was using dos. With 1024mb, Quake 3 ran fine with no tweaks.
Nevertheless.

Heres some stuff I found on the issue.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb%3ben-us%3b253912

http://www.techdo.com/showthread.php?t=5869

http://www.thpc.info/ram/vcache98.html

sb306 wrote on 05.05.09 at 05:31:42:

elfuego wrote on 03.05.09 at 19:46:43: ^^ Thanks! I fixed the problem in another way - I limited the RAM via msconfig. So, after you changed the min and max cache - can windows still utilize the whole 1024MB of RAM or not? Can u test it in Sandra or similar? Im not quite sure if it was or not. Windows recognized the full amount in the windows sytem tab before and after I modified the system.ini file. Ill look around the web and see what I come up with. Btw, I was running win98 se.

No need to look around. Right click on my computer -> properties. Note the amount of "seen" RAM. Download Sysoft Sandra for windows 98 (se) and do a test of memory. Note the amount of RAM seen by sandra. If its full 1024MB, then I guess it sees it all.

If that is so, then I'm getting 1.5GB for my win98 rig (currently running 768MB)  :)

It must have been using it then, since it was showing over a gb of memory under properties. I didnt get a chance to check with sisoft though since I swapped the sdram setup with my ddr setup. hehe. It looks like I did have a bad cpu. Once I got the "new" one, the motherboard worked fine.

But from what Ive read, win98 can use over 1 gb of ram. How efficiently it uses it may be a different story though.  

I checked out quake 3 at 1280x1024 with everything on high, with 256mb and then again at 768. All the results were within a tenth of one another. Although this doesnt really prove anything though. hehe
;)

sb306 wrote on 06.05.09 at 11:56:24:

It must have been using it then, since it was showing over a gb of memory under properties. I didnt get a chance to check with sisoft though since I swapped the sdram setup with my ddr setup. hehe. It looks like I did have a bad cpu. Once I got the "new" one, the motherboard worked fine. But from what Ive read, win98 can use over 1 gb of ram. How efficiently it uses it may be a different story though.   I checked out quake 3 at 1280x1024 with everything on high, with 256mb and then again at 768. All the results were within a tenth of one another. Although this doesnt really prove anything though. hehe ;)

Thanks for the reply.

Quake doesnt use more then 256MB I guess. Try Morrowind - that was the game I had to buy memory for. If you run it with 512MB on Windows 98, it worked more or less ok, with no hiccups (though u needed an overclocked, low latency SDRAM to run it smoothly).
However, if u ran it on windows XP, nothing short of 1024MB was enough to run it smoothly.