- Apr 16, 2016
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Hi, I bought 8Gb (4x2GB) of brand new (unbranded, but Elpida is visible on the chips) DDR2-800, unbuffered non-ECC to use in my newly-acquired Asus Crosshair II motherboard. The memory was sold as being suitable for AMD-processor motherboards only. The motherboard may be a bit old, but I was trying to find a cheap way of getting to run my Nvidia M2090, and surprisngly few cheap motherboards seem to allow the use of a graphics card with no monitor capability alongside the standard built-in graphics adapter, for double-precision computational fluid dynamics, for which at a budget price the M2090 still beats most things hands down.
None of the new memory sticks would even allow the motherboard to get as far as bios setup, and the LCD post screen (I thought it was a gimmick, but it turned out to be very useful) kept indicating it was stopping at varying points that pointed to a memory problem. The furthest it got was showing the ROG logo on the screen with 'press DEL to enter setup...', and then a pattern appeared overwriting specs on the screen, and it would boot no further. I've forgotten the exact message on the LCD post screen, but it indicated it was stuck at a memory check.
I found an old stick of 512MB DDR2-800 and it booted perfectly with that first time. I reset bios parameters to 'safe defaults', and tried each stick of the new ram again and it made no difference.
I sent CPU-Z prints to the seller when asked and they didn't suggest any parameter changes to make, but I'm reluctant to just return it and get a refund because it was really cheap memory - if it's necessary to sacrifice a bit of performance to get it to work reliably, it would be worth it. Although I'm experienced at building PCs (ahem.... for over 25 years), I've never actually had memory problems before or had to get into memory tuning. Are there any 'safer than safe default' settings I could change to try to get it to at least work, and then see what I could improve to bring the performance back up a bit? The bios is already the latest version
Thanks for any assistance
Mike
None of the new memory sticks would even allow the motherboard to get as far as bios setup, and the LCD post screen (I thought it was a gimmick, but it turned out to be very useful) kept indicating it was stopping at varying points that pointed to a memory problem. The furthest it got was showing the ROG logo on the screen with 'press DEL to enter setup...', and then a pattern appeared overwriting specs on the screen, and it would boot no further. I've forgotten the exact message on the LCD post screen, but it indicated it was stuck at a memory check.
I found an old stick of 512MB DDR2-800 and it booted perfectly with that first time. I reset bios parameters to 'safe defaults', and tried each stick of the new ram again and it made no difference.
I sent CPU-Z prints to the seller when asked and they didn't suggest any parameter changes to make, but I'm reluctant to just return it and get a refund because it was really cheap memory - if it's necessary to sacrifice a bit of performance to get it to work reliably, it would be worth it. Although I'm experienced at building PCs (ahem.... for over 25 years), I've never actually had memory problems before or had to get into memory tuning. Are there any 'safer than safe default' settings I could change to try to get it to at least work, and then see what I could improve to bring the performance back up a bit? The bios is already the latest version
Thanks for any assistance
Mike
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