As Alien Zord said, the POST screen usually tells you.
If not, then what kind of motherboard or PC is is. Some motherboards or PCs
(Acer), tell you in the BIOS if EDO or parity is installed.
Most 72 pin RAM was FPM. Early 72 pin 1 mb and 2 mb modules may not have
been FPM, I would say all 4 mb and up were FPM. Of these some were EDO.
If you have the SIMMs in front of you, you can guess if it is parity as most
had 9 chips on a side or 8 on the front and 4 on the back. If it had 8
chips, it was non-parity.
To guess if it was EDO, the chip part number was ending in a 1-9 digit, not
a 0. For example, xxx4400-60 would be a 4 megabit chip, 60 ns, used to make
4 mb FPM parity or non-parity SIMMs. If it was xxx4401 or xxx 4403 or 4409,
etc, it was almost always EDO. Some EDO used A or B to indicate that it was
EDO 4400A.
Now 16 mbit chips were usually 7400 for FPM, 7401 or 7403 for EDO. 16 mBit
whips were used to make 16 mb SIMMS.
And if the SIMM was double sided, the 4400 chip would make 8 mb SIMMs, the
7400 chip would make 32 mb SIMMS.
This is a very simple introduction to telling the size and type of RAM from
the chips used, there are exceptions and configurations I won't mention as
too many. This technique does not work on 168 pin RAM as the patterns to
the chips is not the same.
