Jump to content
Corsair Community

Value select pc3200 and ECS PT800CE-A


Recommended Posts

I purchased an ECS PT800CE-A motherboard and a 3.2 prescott P4 800mhz bus cpu a little over a month ago. This combo was running fine with 2x512mb of pc2100 micron. I recieved 2x512mb of corsair value select pc3200 for Christmas. That is when all hell broke loose. Blue screens of death, programs freezing,cmos resetting to default, and over and over booting seemed to be a now common activity. I put the pc 2100 back in and all was well again. Hmm, bad memory I thought. Ran windows memory tester and came up with LRAND and STRIDE6 errors. Tested modules separately but no errors. Then tested both with memtest86 v3.2 and on first pass 44 errors on test 5 and 1 error on test 7. Second pass yielded 35 errors on test 5 and 1 on test 7. Tested each individually for 2 passes and no errors. Wierd I thought but I see it happens to others on this forum too. Here are all my specs.

 

3.2ghz p4 800mhz bus

ECS PT800CE-A motherboard

TI4200 NVIDIA video card 8x AGP

Sounblaster Audigy sound card

ECHO STAR EC-P580D power supply (supposedly 580 watts)

Maxtor 160gb ata133 HD

Motherboard bios updated to v1.0e

Windows XP

 

Memory: Corsair value select 2x512mb VS512MB400 Lot 0438088-0

System ran well with 2x512mb pc2100 micron

 

Current CPU Frequency 200MHZ

Current DRAM Frequency 200MHZ

DRAM Clock By SPD

DRAM Timing Auto by SPD

SDRAM CAS LATENCY 2.5

Bank Interleve 4 Bank

Precharge to Active 4T

DRAM Command Rate 2T Command

 

These are the default seetings in bios. I do not overclock or know how too.

 

I tried running the VS pc3200 memory in my shuttle with a fs51 motherboard and system ran well. But this motherboard accepts up to 333mhz ram, not 400mhz ram. Tested with memtest and windows memory tester and no errors. So I would assume that if I set my PT800CE-A up for 333mhz ram I would get no errors. Just assuming, which I am bad at. But that would also defeat the purpose of using pc3200 ram wouldn't it. As stated above I did flash the bios to the newest version. Any ideas? Sorry for long post but I wanted to get all facts in.

 

Just wanted to add that at this moment computer froze running memtest86 v3.2 on a single module of the value select pc3200. No errors were noted though.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I contacted ecs the same time I talked to you. They told me to update bios again with a new firmware number that I cannot find listed on the websight. It was a link from the email. I did and now I got bootblock bios. I tried using a bootdisk and reflashing but when it tries to detect floppy it just comes back and says something like insert system disk and hit a key. Problem is it is locked up and will do nothing when I hit a key. Bootdisk is in drive. I made it from this computer running xp. Any ideas? I was hoping the new bios which said it would fix some 400mhz memory unstability would work. Waiting for ECS to reply again. Thanx for your help. I can now see that most of these people you help have a problem with motherboard and not your quality memory.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

Motherboard still bad and ECS won't help. Vendor says deal with ECS. So I bought another pt800ce-a motherboard. I used a different bios flasher program with the bios 1.1d which was just released 1/10/2005. All is well. No more blue screens and no more errors. I guess why I came back to update my thread is because I have a feeling that most of the people that come here blaming corsair memory as bad really dont have bad memory. Blame the low cost but promising high result motherboards that are brought out on the market that just arent what they are supposed to be. Corsair ram to me is one of the best rams out there, just be careful buying new mobos that have a bios update every couple weeks for over a year. Thanks Ram Guy and good luck all

 

:): :): :):

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Bingo. While Corsair isn't perfect, neither is any other company out there. Sometimes people read too much into the posts here (and since this is a HELP forum, not many people come here to praise it), sometimes people read "memory error" and assume it's physical memory, not virtual memory or a memory location on the HDD.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...