When purchasing a new Server, Workstation or PC to support an expansion card one of the most important things to determine is what type of slot does the motherboard have. There are 3 types of slots that have been used for over the years: ISA, PCI, and PCI Express (PCIe). These are also the most common types of slots that computer motherboards have had for expansion cards. Let’s take a look at each of these:
How To Find How Many Ram Slots Are Used Without
ISA Slots
Find Out How Many Ram Slots Are Used Windows 10
- If you have a PC, you will find the RAM slots on your motherboard near the CPU. There will be two, three, or four slots where you could install RAM. If there are four slots on the motherboard, the pairs will be color-coded to indicate which slots go together for installing RAM.
- The number of memory devices in the results of sudo dmidecode -type 17 is equal to the number of memory slots, so the command to print the number of RAM slots is: sudo dmidecode -type 17 grep 'Memory Device' -count The results of this command will be one integer number equal to the number of RAM slots.
The ISA Slots are shown in Green in image to the right. This is the oldest slot type that is still available today. Computers with ISA slots are no longer available from major computer manufacturers, Ram PC Systems still sells industrial class systems with ISA slots.
PCI Slots
It's pretty rare that I have the chance to open one of our ESXi hosts, but I need to know if all RAM banks are being used. If so, I'll need to order and install a second processor so I can add more RAM to the hosts (Dell Poweredge R410 & R610). When we had physical servers I would run the Crucial memory scanner.
PCI slots were the replacment for ISA slots. The PCI Slots are shown in the Red box in the image. PCI slots come in several different versions including 5 volt and 3.3 volt slots, and 32-bit and 64-bit PCI-X slots. PCI slots are going away as well but are still available from some major computer manufacturers but they usually only offer one PCI slot. Ram PC Systems has several different systems available with 2 or more PCI slots.
PCI Express Slots
PCI Express slots are the replacement for PCI slots, and also AGP (used only for video cards). PCI Express, also labeled as PCIe come in numerous bus widths labeled: x1, x2, x4, x8, and x16.