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I have a motherboard that only supports simms, so a 256mb dimm shows up as 128mb. Would some kind of update fix this or is it a hardware thing that can only be fixed by getting a different motherboard?

Thanks
-Nate

what mboard is this?

Greg

an old k6-2 motherboard. It's a SOYO SY_5EHM v1.1

Originally posted by impuresoul2k3
I have a motherboard that only supports simms, so a 256mb dimm shows up as 128mb.

Ehhh... a DIMM won't fit in a slot for a SIMM. They are physically different devices. Typically this would be a limitation of the board, but the manual says it will support a 256Mb DIMM (see http://www.soyousa.com/downloads/index.php for the manual). Do you have any additional SIMMs installed? Maybe a BIOS update?

I stuck in a stick of 256mb pc133 and it only shows up as 128mb in the bios startup screen and in windows 2k, and I did find the difference between SIMMS and DIMMS but...

I checked and there are only DIMMS in there, but it still only recognizes half of it

Ok I checked soyo's website and found it will only support 128mb of ram per stick. Will a bios update fix this

Probably not, as the memory is determined by your chipset on the mobo.

Originally posted by impuresoul2k3
Ok I checked soyo's website and found it will only support 128mb of ram per stick. Will a bios update fix this

Huh... the manual said it will support 256Mb DIMM??

2x128?

Originally posted by Magexx9
2x128?

http://www.soyousa.com/downloads/filedesc.php?id=1525

RTFM. pages 7-8, unless I'm losing it.

Huh, the website for it says 8/16/32/64/128

http://www.soyousa.com/products/proddesc.php?id=179

Does being single or double sided matter?

The manual says:

Supports 2 strips of 168-pin SDRAM unbeffured DIMM 2 x 168-pin DIMM banks support 8/16/32/64/128/256 MB unbuffered DIMM modules.

So it seems to support a max of 512MB for SDRAM. My guess is that it supports only the older 256MB SDRAM sticks which use different memory chips (with less datalines for the chips). Your newer stick might uses memory chips with a wider databus and thus the controller can only use half of the sticks capacity. No BIOS update can fix that problem.
Check http://www.valueram.com/support/InstallSDRAM133.asp for detailed infos.

I'm with the doc here. Some older mobo's only support what they call single sided ram. I remember seeing this more with SIMMS than with DIMMS but I have seen it. Chances are your using a double sided dimm and your board just doesnt support it.

I'll check on it but I think it's single sided, I ram came from some dells we had bought it for and they can only read half of it too and the run P4s