I have an old packard bell, motherboard 640 (i430fx). It has terrible ram support. its extreamly limited. I currently have only 24mb of ram in it. it wont support 32mb edo sticks or 4k refresh ones. It has probloms with nearly every type except the 8mb it had and 16mb from another packard bell. I don't want to buy even the cheapest ram as it may not work or a mr. bios as it may not help. I have a mr.bios for a pb680 (i430vx). Would flashing with this work as it may work with a variety of pentium packard bells or will it kill it. Any Experience?? I suppose it wouldn't be a disaster if it died anyway

Don't flash using the wrong BIOS, you'll definitely kill the board.

The old 430FX chipset only cached 64MB of RAM...if you exceed that amount, you'll hurt the performance.

If the board uses 72-pin SIMMs, they must be installed in matched pairs. If it uses 168-pin DIMMs, they must be EDO (possibly 5v only)...PC66, PC100, PC133 will not work

Asus A7N8X-X
1800+ @ 8.5 x 200MHz
768MB PC3200
Asus A9550 128MB/128-bit
Gamer Edition
WinME/WinXP Pro

i know that. i can actually put 64mb ram in but when memtestx86 run it finds infinite errors. sometimes with ither ram it only detects half or a quarter. at the moment ive got it to 50mb ram but the system registers 32mb. it runs fine even in memtestx86 but wont reconise all of it. it has: 8mb 8mb 32mb 2mb. this ram all works as i used it in a now dead pb680 (i430vx) motherboard.

"it has: 8mb 8mb 32mb 2mb"

Those are not matched pairs. You should either have 4 x 16MB or 2 x 32MB

i've had mixed working before:
8mb 8mb 32mb 32mb but this configuration didn't work in this pc so i had to use the one previously mentioned and nor did just 32mb 32mb (the max). maybe 16x4 will work but im not buying something that might not work.