Ram Simm traces on board useful?

[Sega]

Hello, I have a 486 motherboard that has 4X 30-pin simm connectors/sockets on board (2x dual) and there are additional traces for another 4 simms, If I were to solder the missing connectors, can the Mobo have use of them? They all seem to be wired properly.
Thanks for any replies!

 

[krebizfan]

Which motherboard is it? What BIOS? I expect that it may well work unless it was sold by Dell or Gateway or similar companies. You may need a different BIOS to support all 8 sockets and also need to change to cache to handle the larger memory.

 

[Sega]

Which motherboard is it? What BIOS? I expect that it may well work unless it was sold by Dell or Gateway or similar companies. You may need a different BIOS to support all 8 sockets and also need to change to cache to handle the larger memory.

Thanks for your reply. To be honest I don't have much info on this board as there aren't many stamps or labels but I think it came from an old compuAdd 425. The bios is some sort of Phoenix V1.05. Right now it has 4MB installed (4X1Mb 30-pin sticks). I'd like to upgrade it to at least 8MB but at the moment I only have 1MB simms in hand and some 30 pin slot connectors. So the idea is to fill it with the 8 slots with 1MB stick each. Is it possible?

 

[Stone]

Four 4MB sticks is $30 or less and much less work.

 

[Sega]

Four 4MB sticks is $30 or less and much less work.

I'm a bit broke and believe it or not, I have everything in hand to do the modification. Just wondering if it will work more than anything :D

 

[krebizfan]

I can't be sure. I believe that it will work unless CompuAdd modified the BIOS to ignore the extra SIMMs. Unless something very strange is happening, installing the extra SIMM sockets won't adversely affect operation. Worst case, you will have to leave the extra SIMM sockets empty and lose out on however much time spent adding them.

That is based on how I remember the budget (reduced RAM) versions of 486 motherboards worked.