Question RDram or Rimm mem

[Dennis Hagans]

Hey Guys I bought another Dell 530 mt off of ebay, it came with working memory riser boards. had 1BG so I put in another set of 4-256MB for a total of 2GB of memory, I threw my old riser boards away. works like a charm.

Anyway so I thought ok I still have 4 512s and as long as they are matched pairs it is supposed to work, I have now 3GB of 512 modules to throw away as they no longer will work, 2GB of all the same memory put in the riser card and now will not work even in the motherboard memory slots 3GB worth that will no longer work after putting them in the riser boards.

This unit is supposed to be able to be upgraded to 4GB using the riser boards, but every time I try my 512s they won't work anymore.

All of my 512MB are now non-working 12 of them in total. this is so frustrating, this unit is a server, with dual 3ghz Xeon CPU's someone on the Dell site claimed he was able to make it work with 4 GB using riser cards.

There are no switches of any kind on the riser boards, and they are Dell riser boards made to work in this unit.

I put the 256s back in the riser boards and they work fine, but putting the 512s in ruined them all 12 of them.

can anyone sort this out, I want 4GB in this unit, it has been done before

https://www.dell.com/community/Desk.../Precision-530-MT-max-ram-memory/td-p/1981982 BrianBGB response.

https://www.dell.com/community/Desk...e-maximum-RIMM-module-size-query/td-p/1183190 chris89 response.

it is a Xeon Server for goodness sakes, it has plenty of power to do audio and video which is what I want to do with it.

I cut my teeth on building and upgrading computers in the early 90s and beyond,

 

[SamirD]

Sounds like you have a bad riser board. You should also check how many part numbers or revisions they had of the riser board, motherboard, etc.

And I wouldn't throw anything away since it's going to be cheaper to fix something than finding another working one.

 

[Dennis Hagans]

I have a Dell precision 530 mt and it came with working riser boards, it came with 1GB 4 x 256

I populated all riser board slots with 256s and it came up and ran nice with 2GB, so I took 1GB out and put 4 x 512s in, it would not come up and it beeped,

put my 512's back in the system they were in and they no longer work as it beeps now

I had 8 matched pairs of 512s and riser boards I bought, and those were ruined, I thought my riser boards were bad until I tried the ones that I knew were working and ruined my last 2GB of 512s

so in total 3gb 12 x 512s are now unusable.

https://www.dell.com/community/Desk...e-maximum-RIMM-module-size-query/td-p/1183190

skip down to chris89 comment.

https://www.dell.com/community/Desk.../Precision-530-MT-max-ram-memory/td-p/1981982

skip down to BrianBGB comment

those are two sources that say with riser boards you can have 4GB of ram, my Dell riser boards were made for this system and have ruined 12 x 512 memory modules so that they no longer work.

as best I can tell there is no bios setting or switches on the motherboard, nor are there any switches on the riser boards.

can anyone help me resolve this, my nice working system is a Server, it has dual Xeon 3Ghz CPUs with 4mb of l3 cache each, I wanted to use this for doing audio and video editing, since I took 3 of these systems and made one jam up nice one, according to those sources it is supposed to be capable of 4GB of memory, also there are 2 x Dell crimms in slots 3 and 4 on the mainboard.

 

[SamirD]

Your riser boards are bad or there is some other technical requirement you are missing--and it will be hard to find this information with the age of the system.