Someone told me you can easily tell if a stick of ram (DDR1) is
considered Double Sided if the ram modual has chips on both sides of the
PCB, is this true?
Kinda... true. Certainly for reputable PC unbuffered DIMMs which conform
to the standards it's true. What you really mean by double sided I believe
is "dual rank"... IOW two independently addressable ranks of memory on a
single DIMM. In that case each side is populated with eight x8 chips and
you have 64-bits of width on each side.
There have, however, been some lower tier "manufacturers" who have sold
what they have called "high density modules" where they populate each side
with eight x4 chips, so 16 chips organized as a 64-bit wide single rank.
It looks "double sided" but it ain't... to be avoided.
