System sees 1GB stick as 512

DanGDanG I AM CANADIAN Icrontian
edited October 2006 in Hardware
I sold a buddy my old shuttle shuttle system. I was running an A64 3200+ and he's running a sempron 3200+ in it now. He also bought a 1GB stick of kingston ram to use in it. When installed in either of the 2 slots, it only shows 512, in both the bios and in windows. I started troubleshooting with him and he brought it over last night and we tried my 1GB stick in the shuttle and it only shows 512, which is odd because it's the 1gb stick I used in there, and it worked fine when I used it. I tried his 1GB stick in my system and it shows up as 1GB in both the bios and in windows.
Is there a limit based on the type of CPU? That's the only thing I can think of. It's using the most current bios they have out.

Any ideas?

Comments

  • danball1976danball1976 Wichita Falls, TX
    edited October 2006
    It is possible that the motherboard is not compatible with double sided DRAM, or that it isn't compatible with 1GB sticks at all.
  • DanGDanG I AM CANADIAN Icrontian
    edited October 2006
    It's my old system, when I had it, I had a 1GB stick and 1 512MB stick. When he brought it over last night I tried my exact ram (that's working fine in my current system @ 1GB and 512MB) that used to be in that system and it showed up as 512, so it's not an incompatibility because I ran it like that for ~2 years. The only thing I can think is that it's a difference between the CPU's.
  • danball1976danball1976 Wichita Falls, TX
    edited October 2006
    Maybe the RAM is bad. Oh, is the stick DDR or DDR2? Try updating the BIOS
  • muddocktormuddocktor
    edited October 2006
    I think it sounds like the mobo is trying to go tits up, if the same stick of ram you have now used to show up as 1 GB and now only shows as 512 MB.
  • TimTim Southwest PA Icrontian
    edited October 2006
    Go to crucial.com and enter your make and model of computer in the memory advisor tool. It'll show how much RAM your computer can handle in its memory slots.

    If it's an older system, chances are it simply can't use the full capacity of a 1 GB stick.

    I've put 512 MB PC133 SDRAM sticks in OLD 1998-1999 computers and seen them read as 128 MB each. It took me a while to find a computer running SDRAM that could read the full 512 MB per stick, and it was on a Biostar M7VKQ Version 1.0 AMD Athlon motherboard.
Sign In or Register to comment.