On 24 Feb 99, at 10:15, Michael Eisenstadt wrote:


> Someone has offered to sell me 16Mb 30-pin SIMMs from
> a Mac.  Would this work?

  It depends.

  First of all, of course, your PC has to *have* 30-pin slots.  You can
get adapters that will take 4 30-pin SIMMs and fit in a 72-pin slot,
but they're not recommended -- too many additional places for things to
go wrong.

  Macs generally don't use parity RAM, so these are probably non-
parity.  PCs used to pretty much insist on parity; then it became a
BIOS setup option.  You need to make sure you can run without it for a
while.

  Timing is also a factor; smaller is better.  Current 30-pin SIMMs
should be rated at 60 ns.  [The individual chips on the SIMM should
have a "-6" suffix.]  Older PCs can get by with 70ns or even 80ns RAM.
  Some slow Mac models from the late 1980s/early 1990s used 110ns RAM;
I don't know that I've ever seen a PC that could be happy with that.


David G

         The PCBUILD web site always needs good submissions.  If
          you would like to contribute to the website, send any
               hardware tech tips or hardware reviews to:
                           [log in to unmask]