Importance of SPD?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Maria Ripanykhazova
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Maria Ripanykhazova

I have been mixing and matching chips as I suppose everyone does (making
sure that they are all, e.g. 100 mhz chips) and have suddenly started to get
a supposedly important error message telling me that the SPD is missing or
inconclusive on some of them

I could probably tell by elimination which ones are giving the error message
although at the moment it looks as if all of them are and some will let me
go into windows, some wont

Is there any test I can run to tell me if a chip will work OK even with this
error message and what is wrong with others or what is wrong with them in
this particular system?

I have tried memtest but it runs interminably and SEEMS to end up just
telling me if a chip is bad, which I suspect none of these are.
 
Maria Ripanykhazova said:
I have been mixing and matching chips as I suppose everyone does
(making sure that they are all, e.g. 100 mhz chips) and have
suddenly started to get a supposedly important error message
telling me that the SPD is missing or inconclusive on some of them
Click to expand...

SPD = small serial eeprom on the dimm stick

Pozdrawiam.
 
from the wonderful person said:
I have been mixing and matching chips as I suppose everyone does (making
sure that they are all, e.g. 100 mhz chips) and have suddenly started to get
a supposedly important error message telling me that the SPD is missing or
inconclusive on some of them

I could probably tell by elimination which ones are giving the error message
although at the moment it looks as if all of them are and some will let me
go into windows, some wont

Is there any test I can run to tell me if a chip will work OK even with this
error message and what is wrong with others or what is wrong with them in
this particular system?

I have tried memtest but it runs interminably and SEEMS to end up just
telling me if a chip is bad, which I suspect none of these are.
Click to expand...

Memtest is the best thing for testing memory. however if the SPD is
wrong/broken then the BIOS may be selecting the wrong memory speed
parameters (of which '100 Mhz' is probably the least interesting number)
= you'd have to go into the BIOS startup screen and manually set the
memory parameters .. at which point knowing what the chips are actually
good for is sort of useful.
 
Memtest just keeps on running interminably, repeating something or other
over and over again and reports that everything is OK and that all chips
pass all tests. The reason for my posting was to find out how important SPD
was rather than find out that it is a small eeprom which I already knew but
there again, if the important bit is that memtest will tell me all I need to
know, then that is really all I need to know, isn't it! I assume therefore
that the data on the EPROM isn't important so long as the memory itself
passes the test The dodgy bit is that some chips which pass memory only
sometimes register their memory in the OS and only sometimes let me into the
OS itself.
Memtest is the best thing for testing memory. however if the SPD is
wrong/broken then the BIOS may be selecting the wrong memory speed
parameters
Click to expand...

But I have absolutely no reason to think tha tthese spd chips actually
broken except for the error messag which is inconclusive, to say the least!

(of which '100 Mhz' is probably the least interesting number)
= you'd have to go into the BIOS startup screen and manually set the
memory parameters .. at which point knowing what the chips are actually
good for is sort of useful.
Click to expand...
(I am not really in a position to find out all sorts of arcane data within
the chip itself unless I can post here and someone will know what the chip
is?)
 
I have been mixing and matching chips as I suppose everyone does (making
sure that they are all, e.g. 100 mhz chips) and have suddenly started to get
a supposedly important error message telling me that the SPD is missing or
inconclusive on some of them

I could probably tell by elimination which ones are giving the error message
although at the moment it looks as if all of them are and some will let me
go into windows, some wont

Is there any test I can run to tell me if a chip will work OK even with this
error message and what is wrong with others or what is wrong with them in
this particular system?

I have tried memtest but it runs interminably and SEEMS to end up just
telling me if a chip is bad, which I suspect none of these are.
Click to expand...

SPD just stores the timing settings for the memory modules. If SPD is
missing, beyond the fact that it violates the PC100 spec, it just
means that you need to manually set the timings in the motherboard's
BIOS.

What you might be running into is that multiple unmatched memory
modules might have different timings stored in their individual SPD
chips. Since each module has different timings your board might just
be getting confused.

Either way the solution should be fairly straightforward, assuming the
BIOS is smart. Just go into your BIOS, probably under "Advanced CMOS
Setup" (or something along those lines) and set the memory timings
manually. You'll probably want to set the timings to the slowest
setting (highest numbers) at least initially to test.


In short, SPD is nice because it automatically configures the memory
timings for you, but it's not critical and it's programs incorrectly
in a disturbingly large number of memory modules anyway.
 
Thanks everyone for telling me that it really doesn't matter what the SPD
tells the OS or the BIOS: So long as I can get into windows the important
bit is how much memory I can use.

I have to admit I have never seen any part of the BIOS where you can set
internal memory speed but as I say, the baffling bit is that sometimes it
registers different amounts of memory but I can always reboot and as long as
I see how much memory I know to be actually there, that is all that is
important.
 
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