Motherboard running 8gb modules but only 4gb supported

jackson1420

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I have a friend who has been having issues with her machine. She has been experiencing a bad refresh issue in Excel only. No error messages are being logged.

Running Win7 Pro SP1. Updated all the way. 64-bit machine running 64-bit Office. 16GB of RAM. i7 2nd gen.

She has an MSI H55M-E33 motherboard. HERE is the link to the product page.

The motherboard it supports 4gb modules but nothing higher. For some reason she has two 8GB modules totaling 16gb. The system is running but could this be causing the refresh issue in Excel?

She must alt+tab to get it to refresh properly and typically doesn't happen until she has a bunch of things going on at once.

An example is:

Notice in the middle is where it looks unnatural. I have turned off special graphic features in Windows.
2irqcgm.jpg


Any ideas? Let me know if I should provide more information and I will get it ASAP.
 
Solution
To be completely honest, yes that is probably why it is happening. The system is storing to memory blocks that it can detect, but the MB isn't keeping track of them properly.

jackson1420

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That is what I was thinking. I wish the motherboard would tell me or fail from the get-go if it is the RAM.

I will purchase 4GB modules as stated in the product page and I will surely post back the results.

Any other ideas are more than welcomed
 

jackson1420

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UPDATE:

The issue seems to have gone away. I will update in the future if the issue comes back.

The issue is weird because if the motherbaord can't support 8 GB modules then why would it even boot?

I ran memtestx86 using every possible bit of RAM without error for 15 hours. But I was using 2GB per memtest. Perhaps the issue is deep under the software layer and related to memory plus the MOBO not supporintg 8GB modules.

Without further debugging I will leave the issue for now but I will update in the future if the issue comes back.
 

jackson1420

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Wanted to update this post...

itzdanielp

You helped confirm my suspicions but for some reason I cannot select your post as an answer.. I guess it is just a suggestion lol.. but anyways..

The system is still running strong and since I installed "supported" RAM the issue never showed itself again.