Dell 960 Memory Allocation

[Uranium-235]

Intel P43 does

but pretty much any AM2/AM2+ CPU supports non-registered 4gb sticks cause it has 11 column address bits instead of the usual 10 (bios support varies)

[Topcat]

Originally Posted by Uranium-235

Intel P43 does

but pretty much any AM2/AM2+ CPU supports non-registered 4gb sticks cause it has 11 column address bits instead of the usual 10 (bios support varies)

....and the super awesome chipsets (seaburg, greencreek, and the like) were 64gb~128gb!!

Intel was notorious for that....'consumer' grade chipsets having low RAM support. If you remember the BX and the GX back in the day... BX supported 1gb, GX 2gb, otherwise identical chipsets.

[ratdude747]

Originally Posted by ChaosLegionnaire

i think ratdude or dan87 had this problem before several years ago and they posted about it here too. my stand is still the same back then as it is now. i think its the 32-bit pci address space problem like with the gart table like per hansson said. thats why the memory hole still sticks even with a discrete gpu. some asus boards have a bios option to remap the 32-bit pci address space above 4gb to fix this type of issue and have the full 4gb usable, so its dell's crap bios at work.

i also did some memory benchmarking with the pci address space remapped. having the memory remap feature ON made memory latency slower by 1 ns. complete non-issue in real world applications and not noticeable at all. what is noticeable is the system being faster with more ram available when using memory hungry programs that gobble ram like skittles... just posting this for informational purposes in case someone is curious if the feature affects memory performance and why would u turn it off? lol.

Something like that. I can't remember the specifics. Came into play when I was trying to use the Gavotte PAE RAMdisk routine to maximize the 4GB on my Dell Latitude D630's XP setup (it had a discrete GPU, a NV86 Quadro that was made after they fixed bumpgate)... such hampered how much I could actually utilize, and ultimately it wasn't all that useful, at least compared to what I was doing on my Xeon Gallatin builds (which ran 8GB, allowing for a 4.8GB RAMdisk that handled the paging file and TEMP).

[ratdude747]

Originally Posted by Topcat

....and the super awesome chipsets (seaburg, greencreek, and the like) were 64gb~128gb!!

Intel was notorious for that....'consumer' grade chipsets having low RAM support. If you remember the BX and the GX back in the day... BX supported 1gb, GX 2gb, otherwise identical chipsets.

512mb 815? Even by PIII coppermine standards, that was dog crap.

[Topcat]

Originally Posted by ratdude747

512mb 815? Even by PIII coppermine standards, that was dog crap.

Yup...I remember those well.... A client wanted me to make a web/SQL server from one on the tail end of their 'usefulness'. When limited to 512mb RAM it wasn't too great....even though it was the dual version (acorp i815epd). The VP6 with 2gb RAM wasn't bad for things like that back in the day....VIA chipset.

[ratdude747]

Originally Posted by Topcat

Yup...I remember those well.... A client wanted me to make a web/SQL server from one on the tail end of their 'usefulness'. When limited to 512mb RAM it wasn't too great....even though it was the dual version (acorp i815epd). The VP6 with 2gb RAM wasn't bad for things like that back in the day....VIA chipset.

As quirky as VIA was, they were indeed the best for consumer coppermine boards.

Too bad ALI wasn't making chipsets at the point... The Super7 and 370 Celeron ones were nice. Much less quirky than VIA.

[ChaosLegionnaire]

i've always wondered why intel crippled their consumer line 815 chipsets with only 512mb of ram. my assertion is that the consumer OSs of the time (win95/98) didnt support more than 512 mb of ram properly. so intel also cripped the chipset on purpose so both intel and the oem pc maker wouldnt get complaints from users adding on more ram than was supported. crippling the chipset would also allow cost cutting in the core logic of the chipset as it doesnt need to support that much ram physically! better profit margins!

windows nt 4, the dominant server and workstation OS at the time has no issues with 4gb of ram so the server and workstation chipsets werent crippled and supported the full 4gb too.

[BigTroll]

I have a optiplex 960 SFF and its been sitting in my storage unit for awhile, it has something called the dell quiet kit and if i put in a pci graphics or extra memory I get some stupid message on the bios screen about quiet kit. look at this BS https://www.dell.com/support/article...347931?lang=en