DDRII 667 RAM Problems

[Davius]

This one is doing my head in

ASRock 775DUAL-VSTA Motherboard
Bios 1.90
Intel Core 2 Duo 6300 Processor
2 X Adata DDRII 667MHz RAM
Samsung 80Gb S-ATA Hard Drive (set to 150Mb)
ASUS PCI-Ex Radeon X550 Graphics
etc

I had an order for 25 of these. First system built fine, Windows XP Home installed, all drivers, etc. Cloned the hard drives, installed into the other PCs and tested, baring a few glitches all pretty much fine. However the PCs are going to a school with a schools agreement, so they are upgrading to XP Pro.

School called yesterday to say that XP Pro would not install on the first 2 PCs tested. I still have some here so tried installing onto one and it failed. Error copying windows file, a common indicator of a memory problem.

Trawling the web identified various suggestions to do with memory settings, and even the ASRock web site suggests problems with DDR II memory for bios pre 1.80. Have tried a combination of settings but without complete success, can get further into the install but always fails at some point.

Switching to 2 X Adata DDR400 512Mb memory sticks on the same PC and the install works fine, so clearly a DDRII 667 issue.

Am trying on another PC with DDRII installed shortly, if anyone has any suggestions as to the correct memory settings then please post.

ASRock suggested changing the install CD or the cable, not particularly helpful as I already identified the problem is related to DDRII.

 

[evongugg]

Test the memory with memtest86+, different from memtest and memtest86. If there are any errors, RMA the memory.

 

[plankmeister]

I've heard of problems with 667MHz RAM running with C2Ds... I read somewhere on these forums in another thread that it's advisable to runn either 533 or 800. Maybe this is a direct manifestation of that problem?

 

[Davius]

I've set the memory speed to 333MHz (667), the Latency to 5, the mode to dual channel and the voltage to Normal. This does appear to have helped, 2 PCs have successfully installed XP Pro and all of the drivers and a third is well on the way. I propose to try these settings again with the PC I have that has been failing, and if it still fails I'll run Memtest86+ as suggested.

It does look like it's a combination of bad default settings for 667 memory and possibly the odd faulty memory stick too. Important to keep ASRock aware of issues like this though, a simple bios release ought to sort out the defaults.

Will post any info on the memory test when it completes, takes friggin ages on a 1Gb system though...

Incidentally, the motherboard doesn't support DDRII 800, would run at a lower speed. Oddly there's a FAQ on the ASRock web site saying you should run 667 at that speed and not the lower 533 which can cause XP install to fail, but this is meant to be fixed in 1.80.

 

[RSavage]

I've heard of problems with 667MHz RAM running with C2Ds... I read somewhere on these forums in another thread that it's advisable to runn either 533 or 800. Maybe this is a direct manifestation of that problem?

Quack.

Now why would that be? Because there's resonence with the electrons at that speed?

All the speeds quoted are asynchronous. If there is a problem it won't manifest itself like that, not in the middle of the speed range, it'll either be towards the top or towards the bottom. There's no other signal to resonate with.

Likely the motherboard is bad. Return and buy several more until you find one that happens to operate, return the rest for refund.

 

[Davius]

Well, thanks for all of the input, but I think I made it clear that this was a memory issue.

By adjusting the bios memory settings as previously mentioned I've now installed XP Pro onto 5 of the 8 remaining PCs, 2 are yet to be built and 1 refuses to install, it's now blue screening. I think THAT one might be a dodgy motherboard.

Also using the recommended memtest86+ I identified one faulty memory chip, oddly enough in the PC that still won't completely load windows. The odd thing is it did load windows ok with DDR400 installed. Strange, but there we go, I'll swap components until I find the culprit.

Return and buy several more? Lol, I'm a systems builder so have plenty of boards, the reason I raised the enquiry was because NONE of them would install XP Pro until I sorted out the memory settings. Still waiting for ASRock to come back to me with their suggestions for the Adata memory, but at least I'm getting there.

Anyone, one last request, I've been installing firewire cards into these PCs. Someone please tell me why they sometimes only work in pci slot 3 and sometimes in slot 4? I can't fathom it, on cloned identical installations. The first time it happened I had a resource conflict in slot 3, moved it to slot 4 and it worked fine. When assembling if I install in 3 or 4 it's just a lucky guess if I'll have to swap it. Confuses me, why are resources allocated differently in identical PCs?