Duron Video Chipset & Memory

[Peter Lieverdink]

On Thu, 2005-09-08 at 10:32 +1000, Paul Trevethan wrote:
> I have just installed 'Hoary 5.04' on an old Duron 850 machine for my
> (older) sister - who just wants her computer 'to do a few letters, read
> email & browse the odd web page'! She only has 120Mb of memory in it so
> nothing fancy here. :)
> 
> It is chugging along just fine so far, but I have two queries I am not
> able to resolve.
> 
> 1. The m/board has built in video and sound and I don't know how to tell
> whether or not she would benefit from adding the Nvidia stuff? I gather
> I have to find out the chipset for the onboard video, is that right? I
> don't know how to do that. If some kind soul could direct me in that
> regard I would be grateful

You can run 'lspci' from the terminal, that will tell you what hardware
the machine has.

The video card/chip will look something like this:

0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV36.2

Basically, look for the 'VGA' one :-)

> 2. I wanted to boost the machine memory to make life a little less
> 'snail-like' for her. I had an old Kingmax 256Mb pc-133 sdram memory
> stick lying around so I went to put it in the 2nd memory slot in her
> machine. I could not get it to fit properly. It would almost fit but
> seemed just a tad too long to sit snugly in the slot. I wasn't even sure
> if I could add a 256Mb module to a 128Mb module. I tried taking out the
> existing stick and still no joy? When I compared my module to the
> existing one the 128 seemed to be wider than mine as well as a smidgen
> shorter. There were no marking on the existing stick that I could see to
> use to identify it. My question is, how do I tell exactly what memory
> module to get to fit the machine? I thought all sdram modules would be
> the same size but different capacity?

I am 99% sure a duron would use DDR SDRAM, _not_ PC133 DSRAM. Don't try
to insert it, it won't work. Any ddr sdram that is at least as fast as
the minimum spec for that mainboard should work fine (If it is rated
higher, it will just run slower). The 333MHz (PC2700) and 400MHz
(PC3200) varieties are fairly cheap these days (I can pick up a stick of
512MB $cheap_brand DDR3200 for $65 in Melbourne).

> All help much appreciated.
> Paul.

Cheers,
- P.
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