From owner-freebsd-hardware Tue Oct 7 23:46:05 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id XAA25424 for hardware-outgoing; Tue, 7 Oct 1997 23:46:05 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hardware) Received: from www2.shoppersnet.com (shoppersnet.com [204.156.152.112]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id XAA25419 for ; Tue, 7 Oct 1997 23:46:01 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from digital@www2.shoppersnet.com) Received: (from digital@localhost) by www2.shoppersnet.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) id XAA24559; Tue, 7 Oct 1997 23:43:57 -0700 (PDT) Date: Tue, 7 Oct 1997 23:43:57 -0700 (PDT) From: Howard Lew To: Greg Pavelcak cc: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Finicky SDRAM In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Tue, 7 Oct 1997, Greg Pavelcak wrote: > I'm sorry to post this here. It's really not FreeBSD related, but I'm > in kind of a jam, and I hope someone can help me. > > I recently bought an M-Tech R534F mb with Cyrix P200+ and generic > SDRAM. Apparently this SDRAM isn't happy on the board. It crashed > every time when I tried to install from CD with SDRAM but the install > goes OK with simms. (I assume the RAM is the problem since I saw the > same behavior with another mb). > My vendor will swap the SDRAM for Hyundai or > Samsung electronics, but will not refund my full purchase price (I > bought this two months ago), so I'd rather go with the swap than take > a $25 dollar loss. Does anyone have any experience with these > mobo/proc/memory combos? Any recommendations? I don't know much about M-tech motherboards, but when you ask for SDRAM you need to check a few things... What speed are they? There's 66MHz, 83MHz (12ns), and 100MHz (10ns). Faster of course is better. Then you need to check if your motherboard can handle 10ns because some will not. Next, there's the issue of using buffered vs. unbuffered sdram. And finally the 2 clock vs. 4 clock sdram issue. In short, check your manual or contact M-Tech for their recommended SDRAM type. The kind of SDRAM a system takes varies with motherboard manufacturers and chipsets. Is this the motherboard model that runs the PCI bus at 33 with the bus clock at 75? If not, then check your PCI cards because some cards (i.e. some generic S3 ViRGE) will not run higher than 33.