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What are the minimum and maximum amounts of RAM supported? How?

Make sure that the maximum is equal to or greater than 32 Megabytes. Some boards only allow 4 RAM sockets... which means that you may have to throw away you existing chips if you upgrade. Keep in mind that 4 - 32 MB RAM chips is 128 MB of RAM... it is more important to know the possible (intelligent) upgrade levels... not replacement levels. Number and type of sockets, and number of sockets to a bank are imperative! Most motherboards require SIMMs RAM to be installed in even numbers - 2 "chips" at a time, DIMMs only require 1 chip and have larger chips (i.e., above 32MB on one chip). Some manufacturers are able to get liquidation prices on smaller chips, therefore filling most or all of the available RAM sockets with smaller chips making the "upgrade" of RAM more expensive.

RAM has a few differences. The most obvious is the pin count and parity (yes or no). The most common modules have either 30 pins, 72 pins, or 168pins. The sockets on your mother board MUST match the pin count on the RAM. The other differences is type of RAM (standard DRAM, EDO, SDRAM, and PCI 100).

You must also beware of speed ratings. Memory speed is rated in nanoseconds (billionths of a second) the smaller the number the faster. It is generally acceptable to use memory that is rated at a higher speed (fewer nanoseconds) than your Mother-Board, but not vice-versa. It is also NOT recommended to mix different speeds of RAM that are farther than 10 ns apart. It is further not wise to mix manufacturers, as some manufacturers test, rate, and stamp the RAM at a certain speed based on BEST case scenario, others give the same claims but on WORST case scenario. You, obviously, want worse case scenario 60ns or 70ns RAM ("worst case" means that they will be faster "best case"). Consult the technical manual associated with the Mother-Board to verify the speed requirement, 60 nanosecond is usually sufficient.

EDO or not… most of the Pentium class machines take advantage of EDO RAM. Enhanced Dynamic Overlay Ram is faster than standard Ram of the same speed by 20 to 100%, depending on the motherboard, lay-out of the Ram sockets, bios, and busing patterns. PCI 100 RAM is 1000% (10 times) faster than the fastest EDO RAM!