How much ram can a Pentium D address?

I’m currently working on a machine that has a pentium D in it. I have a lot of ram lying around, and specifically I’m looking at an 8GB kit I bought and never used in my DP Dell 680 machine. I actually ended up getting rid of it because I had no way to store it.

Wish I had it now. Oh well.

So the machine to replace it is a Precision 380. On dell’s site it says it supports up to 8GB ram, but thats with like a Core 2 Duo or something. Heres the link.

I have a Pentium D 955, I think, or 965, that happens to work in this machine. But I can’t find anything that would tell me if the machine would then use the whole 8GB kit. Its intended to be used as a dev machine for amiga stuff over AROS (Icaros Desktop) and I want it pretty well set up (I might as well, right?). I just want to make sure everything will work as intended.

The memory controller is on the motherboard northbridge for pre- i-series processors. It depends on the motherboard. I’d imagine later boards that support the older processor can handle more and faster RAM, and would be a better option than some of the first socket 775 boards from before the Core2 era.

Yes it will be due to the memory controller on the Northbridge, and I bet it supports less then 4GB.

You can probably install 4GB total and it iwll address something like between 3GB ~ 4GB MAX.

Using an 8GB kit may not work due to the BIOS not supporting 4GB modules, maybe limited to 1 or 2GB modules.

The Dell Precision 380 will take up to 2GB RAM sticks and does max out at 8GB. The 82955X chipset limit of 8GB of RAM is a wall I’ve gotten used to over the years.

Guess it mostly depends on if you are running the 32 or 64 bit version of AROS.

Running 32 bit. I can only dream of 64bit happening some day. THAT will be amazing. But for right now AROS isn’t stable on 64 bit at all and mostly kernel panics.

Is there somewhere I can look up chipset details? Would wikipedia say stuff about how much ram each chipset supports? I don’t really know much about intel chipsets tbh.

The Intel 955x Chipset does indeed support up to 8GB total.

Found on Intel’s archived web site.

Scroll down to section 1.3.2 for MCH details.

I usually just look up the Chipset in the manual then just search for it. Intel specs on the chipset tend to be easy to find. Wikipedia is good for finding obscure things like PII/III systems that can have 6-8GB of RAM.

pff what

those don’t exist do they?

As far as I know if you are running a 32-bit protected mode operating system it will be limited to addressing 4GB of RAM unless it supports Physical Address Extension (PAE).

The Pentium D does support PAE (and as others have mentioned the chipset memory controller can address up to 8GB of RAM).

PAE extends the virtual addressing to 36-bit which in theory allows up to 64GB of memory to be addressed (or in this case 8GB as that seems the maximum supported by the chipset)

However, it not a simple case of the a 32bit OS just enabling the PAE bit, it also has to implement the required extended paging structures as part of its virtual memory manager.

I’ve yet to look at the AROS source code but I haven’t seen any mention of PAE support so far in the documentation. So, unfortunately, unless the 32bit version of AROS supports PAE you will be limited to 4GB.

1 Like

I was on pentium M’s and pentium 4’s in 2010. I had to learn what PAE was lol.

Theres still a chance I’ll be doing other stuff on the box anyways so more ram is never bad.

I just found this commit on the Git repo, so you may be in luck.

1 Like

I think 4

This topic was automatically closed 273 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.