Support for more RAM - Gateway DX4300-04

[josh_b]

Hey guys,

Any chance the BIOS for a Gateway DX4300-04 can be changed to remove the 8GB RAM cap? I need to be able to load up 4*4GB sticks in this baby. The 780G chipset can handle 16GB on other comparable boards but this one (Gateway 780GS v.1.0) can't. Why?!?

Thanks for your help and advice,

-Josh.

[TheWiz]

A lot of OEM manufacturers change certain features of the board when they go from retail to garbageware. Changing what's supported is impossible because not only is it hard to determine whether or not its hardware related but there's no way to detect it in the BIOS. My reccommendation to confirm all of this would be to see if you could get a spare BIOS chip, test some retail BIOSES with the same specs as yours, and see if any support the larger RAM.

Regards,
TheWiz

[josh_b]

A lot of OEM manufacturers change certain features of the board when they go from retail to garbageware. Changing what's supported is impossible because not only is it hard to determine whether or not its hardware related but there's no way to detect it in the BIOS. My reccommendation to confirm all of this would be to see if you could get a spare BIOS chip, test some retail BIOSES with the same specs as yours, and see if any support the larger RAM.

Regards,
TheWiz

Why would Gateway change this part of the board though?!? What would they get out of it other than spending time qualifying a lesser product.

Out of curiosity, what hardware changes might've been done to prevent me from using more RAM? How would the BIOS have been changed so that initialization (?) of more RAM is no longer possible?

I know you're busy but I am intrigued and perplexed as to why it would've been done.

Thanks for your advice!

[TheWiz]

hey josh_b,

I'm hppy to try and explain the garbage OEM producers pull. basically here's the layout.

Hardware:
The chipset buses are sometimes rengineered simply because this is more cost effective for the OEM. They know most people won't upgrade to 16GB of RAM so they don't want to invest in the cost.

Software(BIOS)
This is a difficult one. I've seen people have memory mapping issues go unexplained and some just enable an option and everything works. In recent years the memory initialization has changes significantly, which the newer BIOS cores seem to generally support more RAM natively.

Thanks for the question!
TheWiz