I've been browsing for RAM on eBay for a while now, and I've noticed that some
sellers claim that the RAM they are selling will not work backwards, or refuse
to work with PC100 RAM.
Are there PC133 RAM chips that won't work in PC100 motherboards? I have a Soyo
V6Be+
Your board uses Via 693 chipset. It doesn't support the moden
high-density PC133 memory that is presumably carrying the
notation you saw. IF your motherboard had been Via 694 chip, it
would've been able to use higher density and lower density
(implied by "PC100" that you saw) simultaneously.
So, their claims aren't technically correct, that PC133 won't
work, it's just that the industry (rather the
marketing/resellers) have taken to making assumptions about
density, that higher density memory is now called PC133 but lower
is PC100. There was low density PC133 memory, but quite
difficult to find new now. Howver, most if not all new
"PC100"memory is likely to run stable at 133MHz... it's not
guaranteed to do so but the technology matured a long time ago
and unless the quality dropped it should still be capable of same
speeds as a few years ago.
If you bought a high density DIMM it'd most likely only show half
capacity in your board. It could easily be stable but no
guarantee. I used to buy 256MB modules intending to use as 128MB
because it made no sense to buy the lower sized modules for same
price, but i already had other modules to test that the
particular board would indeed run stable in that configuration,
at worse I'd just use the memory tested stable and use the "new"
memory as a spare, replacing the spare I'd tested with.... YMMV.
