Well Hellfire what type of board is it "make and model"? Not to be an ass dude but those two pieces of info are critical before I even attempt to answer the question. But I do have an answer for your other question why does my board use rambus and another from 2001 uses ddr.

If I remember correctly Rambus was an Intel board thing that was going on around that time so I'm going to guess that you you have an Intel based board but not all Intel boards used rambus some used ddr as it was a less expensive alternative for Amd boards and some budget priced Intel boards.

But generally rule of thumb is if your board uses rambus you can't install DDR. But if you post the make and model I can make certain that this is the case. Allthough unlikely there were some really strange crossover boards made around that time like "2 slots for 168 pin pc133 and 2 slots for 184 pin ddr dimms" etc.. So give me a shout back and I'll be glad to answer your first question once and for all .

Okay Hellfire heres all the info on the dimension 8100 MOBO http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dsleest/specs.htm#general

Sorry no legacy board here its all rambus

Well that depends on what you mean by chipset to me that means Mobo are you talking about Ram, or cpu,.
If you mean ram then you would use 184 pin rambus rims 256 meg max in size as thats what your board supports 4x256 . if you unsure what I mean then get a system hardware id utility theres tons out there :google is my friend". Or just remove a rimm check it out it usually says if its Ecc or non Ecc on the lable the 2 dont mix so dont combine them in the same system, Now if you mean cpu then the maximum was a 1.7ghz P4 cpu due to the limit of your mobo's fsb