ActiveWindows -- More Than 64 Meg RAM On HX Motherboard

Hardware Tips & Troubleshooting

More Than 64 Meg RAM On HX Motherboard

It has been a myth that Windows 95 won't work with more than 64 meg RAM. That is not true. But older motherboards do have problems with more than 64 MB RAM.

Motherboards with the Intel HX chipsets is one of them. You can upgrade to more than 64 meg RAM but you must be careful. the Intel HX chipset is built in such a way it requires an additional tag RAM chip used to cached the main memory. The main memory is cached to speed up memory access. Now the problem here is, the tag chip is only capable of handling a maximum of 64 MB. If more than 64 MB is installed, only the first (from the bottom) 64 MB is cached.

Most operating systems uses RAM from top to bottom and since only the bottom one is cached, the OS is using the top uncached memory thus slowing down your system and not utilizing your RAM to the fullest.

Some motherboards have no spare tag RAM socket so I'm sorry to say, you only have a limit of 64 RAM. Some motherboards have an extra tag RAM socket. Just order one from your computer dealer, plug it in, and you can happily increased the maximum of cached RAM to 128 MB.

In short, always check how many tag RAM chips you have before buying more RAM than the maximum allows or it might slow down your system instead of speeding it up.

Hardware Tips 4

Return to the Tips index

Hardware Tips 6