M577 and 128Mb SDRAM probs

[gazza82]

Over the past few years I've progressively upgraded my M577 mobo and now want to fully populate the SDRAM slots with 128MB.

I've got several sticks from different sources, all were working before I removed them.

But when I put them in my PC I hungs during the startup .... not when I finds the RAM, but before it loads windows!?!

I've tried various BIOS settings, and have upgraded the BIOS to the latest avail.

So is there anyone out there who can help me? What should I be looking for and what else can I try???

thanks

Gazza

[Peter M]

Well for a start you have to make sure they are all fully inserted. Those DIMM slots tend to get really hard and tight when they grow old, and the BAT form factor boards tend to bend away under your insertion pressure. Tuck something underneath and try again.

regards, Peter

[gazza82]

You don't think it could be the type of SDRAM?

I've since found a page that states the memory should be one of three types: 16Mx4, 8Mx8, 4Mx16 ... I'm not sure what I've got!

thanks for your help

Gazza

[Peter M]

Regarding that, you shouldn't mix very small size DIMMs with very large ones - but otherwise, the VIA MVP3 chipset you got there should take you up to 128 MBytes per DIMM side no problem. I've seen 256-MByte DIMMs at work on M577 (using 1999/03/06 BIOS), so there's nothing inherently wrong in what you do.

regards, Peter

[Baddog]

Some of the older MBs had digrams showing the differant configurations that you could install ram.: 2, 64
2, 16 - 1, 32
2, 16 - 2, 32

And some combos would not work together.

[Baddog]

M577 Super 7 Motherboard

The PCChips M577 motherboard (for K6-2):

100 Mhz bus, TX AGPro chipset, 1 meg L2 cache with support up to 384 MB memory, AGP slot, built in PCI sound with A3D support, AT and ATX power connectors (with all the neat ATX power functions), supports a 66/100 Mhz clock for non-PC100 ram, full Ultra DMA/33, dual USB connector ports, IR port, and all the standard features you would expect.

Sound: The board utilizes the 3D SoundPro chipset, which supports HRTF Positional Audio, DirectSound 3D, and Aureal 3D, and is fully DOS compliant. The software wavetable synthesizer samples are no where near the quality of the Ensoniq-based PCI soundcards, but are OK for the most part. Setup: Really easy.

All voltage settings and cpu multipliers are set via motherboard jumpers. Voltage settings are 2.1- 3.5, bus speeds 60, 66, 75 (PCI 37.5), 75 (PCI 30), 83, 100 (SDRAM 66), and 100 (SDRAM 100) and CPU multipliers are 1.5/3.5 through 5.5.





M577

[Peter M]

Well actually that's VIA MVP3+586B, up to 768 MBytes of RAM, 2.0 to 3.5V, multipliers go up to 6x depending on CPU type (mainboards don't multiply, CPUs do). Mainboard manuals do get outdated sometimes ...

SoundPro is actually C-Media 8330, an ISA PnP device.