RAM on older systems

[gcw1]

Hello, I have a question about ram in older stations. Where I work we still have some old P 133mhz stations in use and recently I have installed windows 98 on a few of them to see how they would run. I have noticed that for some reason when there is more then 64mb of ram installed that the machine seems to start lacking in performance. Is there something with older motherboards or bios' that they can only use a certain amount of ram? and why would having more ram in the machine cause it to lose performance? I can understand no change after a certain amount of ram. I don't know what motherboards these stations are using, but i can tell you that they are HP Vectra VL from around 1997. Thanks.

Glenn

 

[dakota81]

One case to look at is if the newer ram is slower than the current ram (ie 8ns ram when the current ram is 6ns, something like that).

I don't think system ram works the same as processor cache, but I do know that too much cache memory in a cpu reduces performance, due to the size of whatever lookup table is used of what data is where gets too large and thus longer to save & retrieve information, longer than the performance gain of the extra cache memory.

It may also be the harddrives in the computer, because the more ram a computer has, the more disk space Windows will try and allocate for its swap file. If you don't have ample harddrive space, I can see where this can be another problem.

 

[Neo81]

Hey Man


It is because of the memory chips on the ram card itself, they are extended ram chips that the older machines cannot reconize, they can only see half of what is really on the chip its self....

Ram chip (older) |==|
Extended ram chip (newer) |==|EE| fits more on one chip

these older pc's can only read half of the fake chip above, not sure what it is due to but that's the answer to your question.


Later
NEo81 >:O>