ubernerd42 Posted March 11, 2005 Share Posted March 11, 2005 Around Thanksgiving of last year I completely replaced my dual-Athlon rig with an Athlon-64-based system based on the Asus K8N-E Deluxe. I ordered the motherboard, hard disk, processor, and RAM (a packaged pair of VS512MB400C3's) from Newegg, assembled them all, and was completely blown away by the performance. I had a very occassional BSOD problem, mostly when exiting 3D games, that I found out was related to driver issues with my Geforce4 Ti4200. Fast forward to this weekend, when I recieved a new XFX Geforce4 6600GT from Newegg. Now my system crashes very frequently at random intervals. I thought it was a power supply issue, but a new 500-watt PSU didn't help, so I tried testing the RAM. Memtest86 turned up nothing, so I pulled a stick, and (incredibly) the crashing stopped. Switching the sticks didn't affect anything; as long as I only have one stick of RAM in the board, it works perfectly, but with two in any combination of slots, it crashes. Is this likely to be a problem with my RAM? Is the motherboard faulty? Do I need to check my memory timings? I'm not very up-to-speed with hardware issues, so I'm really at a loss here. Any help anyone could offer would be fantastic. Thanks! Here's my rig: Asus K8N-E Deluxe Athlon 64 3000+ with Thermaltake Silent Boost K8 2x Corsair VS512MB400C3 XFX Geforce 6600GT AGP WD Raptor 36.7G SATA 2x Samsung 160G SATA Samsung 16x DVD+/-RW IDE Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yellowbeard Posted March 11, 2005 Share Posted March 11, 2005 I would check with MSI on this one. Also see if you have the latest bios loaded. And, what brand/model of PSU did you buy? All 500w PSUs are not equal. Mike. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ubernerd42 Posted March 11, 2005 Author Share Posted March 11, 2005 I could contact MSI, but since I'm not using any of their equipment it might be better to check with Asus. :biggrin: I just checked the Asus website for the K8N-E Deluxe and it looks like I'm using the most current BIOS. The new PSU was an X-Connect 500W; my current one is the Antec TruePower 350W (I think this is right-- I know it's 350W, and it came with my Antec Sonata). It is possible still that the issue is power-related, but it seems strange that a power issue would cause the system to work with one RAM stick but fail with two. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yellowbeard Posted March 11, 2005 Share Posted March 11, 2005 I could contact MSI, but since I'm not using any of their equipment it might be better to check with Asus. :biggrin: . Uhmmmm.....I'm going back to sleep now :[pouts: Sorry, brainfart. Actually, it is highly possible that it is a power issue. When you remove one stick of RAM, the load on the PSU drops and that could explain the difference. The X-Connect PSUs are supposed to have pretty good rails though so it may not be the issue. What are the RAM timings and RAM voltages set to? Mike. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Corsair Employees RAM GUY Posted March 11, 2005 Corsair Employees Share Posted March 11, 2005 What slots do you have the modules in? I would suggest slots 1-3 or 2-3 and I would set the Dim Voltage to 2.7 Volts and if you still have problems please test the modules one at a time with http://www.memtest.org to be sure. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ubernerd42 Posted March 12, 2005 Author Share Posted March 12, 2005 Haven't tried running Memtest on them individually... running it when they were both in checked out fine, though. Oddly enough, I just stuck them in in slots 2-3 and it's running fine so far. I had previously tried 1-2 and 1-3; apparently assuming that this meant 2-3 wouldn't work was a bad idea. If the problems come back I'll try ratcheting up the voltage and pulling up my timings. Is there any way to do this other than by going into the BIOS menus? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wired Posted March 12, 2005 Share Posted March 12, 2005 BIOS changes can only be made via the BIOS. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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