> I remain a bit mystified about why it would be a hard maximum, though. Did such motherboards prevent the user from installing 4x256MiB for a cool 1GiB of DRAM

> I remain a bit mystified about why it would be a hard maximum, though. Did such motherboards prevent the user from installing 4x256MiB for a cool 1GiB of DRAM? Probably not - it's not that rare to see the supported maximum memory be a function of the biggest DIMM you can buy, I guess as a reflection of the biggest configuration the manufacturer could test.