[Info-vax] 512MB DIMMS - 4GB in Alphaserver 1200

[Bob Gezelter]

On Wednesday, March 9, 2022 at 5:27:58 PM UTC-5, David Turner wrote:
> Got a customer that wants to run 4GB in his Alphaserver 1200 
> 
> That would be 8 x 512MB DIMMS as there are 8 memory slots in the 
> Alphaserver 1200 
> 
> Has anyone tried using PC100 ECC 512MB DIMMs??? 
> 
> I don't have an Alphaserver 1200 here any longer for us to test this. We 
> do have PWS that use the same memory 
> 
> but 4GB.. not possible 
> 
> Anyone care to enlighten me??? 
> 
> 
> David
David,

A word of caution concerning documentation, and, for that matter testing.

The documentation may, in effect, be incorrect. The Alphaserver 1200 documentation was likely written before the larger capacity chips were available. Have had this with disk drives and with memory slots. Both ways (some things worked, and some did not). In recent history, my Dell Latitude 6000-class laptop documentation says "maximum 8GB RAM", but it is quite happily running with 16GB. However, my Alphastations do not have the cooling capacity to deal with some of the 3.5" inch disks, I was warned.

Also, if testing, one should be careful to actually test the expanded memory. Some problems show up as address overmaps, which can cause, to put it politely,challenges.

- Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com