Gigabyte 7ZXE

Hi,

I have a Gigabyte 7ZXE rev 1.1 mainboard. It's been running stable for well over a year with a 512MB SMT branded PC133 stick.

Looking to upgrade to 1GB total RAM, I bought a generic 512MB PC133 stick which failed memtest on this system (on its own without the SMT RAM installed) but tested OK for the supplier, who advised it was a compatibility issue.

I exchanged it for a stick of Corsair VS512MB133 which is said to be compatible with the 7ZXE on the Corsair site. Unfortunately this stick also fails memtest (on its own). The supplier says that this is also a compatibility issue. (When I set CL manually to 3, it failed memtest at a later point in the test than with Auto but failed all the same).

It still runs fine with the SMT RAM which passes memtest no worries.

I don't want to keep exchanging stuff with the supplier without a better idea of where to go from here. Any thoughts?

Each stick was tested with memtest as the only stick in the machine. So it goes

SMT: pass

"Rambo" generic: fail

Corsair VS512MB133: fail

Oh, and CPU is an Athlon XP2000 Palomino if that helps.

With that CPU you should be running the memory frequency at DDR333 and I would set the Dim Over voltage control to +.2 Volts and test the module by it self with http://www.memtest.org.

Did you read that his motherboard does not support DDR memory at all?

IIRC the GA-7ZXE motherboard supports only SDRAM memory - either PC100 or PC133.

Thanks for the responses.

There's no option for RAM voltage in the BIOS, and all the default settings that are there are set to 'High' under 'Auto', but I loaded the optimised defaults and ran memtest again (yeah, just the Corsair stick). No joy I'm afraid. - it failed at 68% completion again.

Just RTFM'd and it says 'Supports only 3.3V SDRAM DIMM'

Thanks for the responses.

 

There's no option for RAM voltage in the BIOS, and all the default settings that are there are set to 'High' under 'Auto', but I loaded the optimised defaults and ran memtest again (yeah, just the Corsair stick). No joy I'm afraid. - it failed at 68% completion again.

 

Just RTFM'd and it says 'Supports only 3.3V SDRAM DIMM'

I'm sorry to hear that. You see, almost all aftermarket SDRAM memory modules require a higher-than-standard voltage (at least 3.5V) just to run stably. So, if your SDRAM mobo is permanently fixed at 3.3V on the memory, you may be stuck.

Thanks RJLeong, maybe I can track down 3.3V SDRAM.

What about Corsair's website saying that their stick was compatible with the 7ZXE? I was hoping not to have to negotiate a 2nd exchange with the supplier.