upgrading RAM query

[kamblemilind]

Hi

I have SIS 630/730 motherboard, 128 MB RAM, AMD Athlon 1.2 GHz its 6 yr old PC. I want to upgrade RAM up to 512 MB.
I asked vendor about upgrading and he told me that ?your motherboard doesn?t support more the 128MB RAM, Bus speed is low, you need to change motherboard for this?.

I am not tech guy. can anyone suggest me.

Do I really need to change Motherboard? or upgrading will work?

thanks.

 

[Peter]

Welcome!

The SiS 730 (Athlon K7) and 630 (Intel P3) northbridges do support 256 MBytes per DIMM "side" no problem. Whether or not your particular mainboard and its BIOS implement that? You'll see when you try.

Just buy a 512-MByte "double sided" PC133 DIMM (32Mx8 RAM technology), plug it in and see what happens.

 

[kamblemilind]

hi Peter, thanks for reply. as i said i am not tech savvy, so i need some spoon feeding

some more questions for you...

as per vendor "Bus speed is low"..does it affect on speed??

also currently i have 128Mb RAM (64 MB + 64 Mb).. so should i buy 512(256 MB + 256 MB) or one 512 MB RAM..

i dont know abt "PC133 DIMM (32Mx8 RAM technology)" can u suggest company name..

thanks in advanced

 

[Steve]

Do you know who made your motherboard? If you can find that out, you can look it up at a memory maker's website (like Crucial or Kingston) and you'll be shown RAM that should be compatible.

 

[kamblemilind]

after googling i found way to chek manufacturer name.
so i did some rnd (mainly restarting the pc) and somthing i got a long string when i boot system.

62-0308-001437-00101111-071595-SiS730s-M810-H

i think my mothere is SiS730s. and as per SiS http://www.sis.com/products/sis730s_features.htm

Integrated PC133 SDRAM Controller
- 3 DIMMs up to 1.5GB of System Memory
- Synchronous or Asynchronous Host/SDRAM Bus Frequency
- BIOS Support for Suspend-To-RAM(STR)

---

i didn't understand what "3 DIMMs" means.

also can anyone let me know i am right or worng about motherboard identification.

 

[Peter]

SiS 730S very obviously is not a mainboard, but a system chipset.

Your mainboard however is a PC-Chips M810 (as identified by the 001437 vendor ID and the M810 product name).

 

[Steve]

Three DIMMs means up to three 'sticks' of RAM.

 

[joex444]

Looks like if your board is that PCChips M810, you have 2 DIMM slots.

From newegg.com, you could get a pqi 512MB PC133 stick for $53, add $5 for shipping, and get $5 back from a mail in rebate, if you wish.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820141515

or for a couple dollars more, Viking makes a similar product, but is probably a little more reliable (pqi is usually a bottom dollar type of memory)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820136118

That's the cheapest that I could find, and doing something like getting two 256MB sticks didn't help either, came out to about $60.

You can also keep one of your 64MB sticks in there and get 576MB out of it.

 

[kamblemilind]

thanks to all.