Ram slot 2, 4, both don't work?

[whitefang]

Hey, I just put together a new computer and I bought 2 4GB ram sticks, total of 8GB. I put both ram sticks in slot 1 and 2 and installed windows. once windows was installed the computer kept on crashing over and over almost immediately (Can't browse web etc) So I took a stick of ram out (From slot 2) and tried again, windows worked flawlessly. So I took the stick that was in there (Working) and I put it into slot 2, the PC would not boot, just a continuous beep, So I tried the other ram in slot 2, same thing. So obviously, slot 2 does not work. So I tried slot 3, it works, but 4 doesn't, just a long beep like slot 2. I tried both sticks of ram, same result.

Am I doing some thing wrong? Or is my motherboard bad? Here's my specs.

Motherboard. GIGABYTE GA-P55-USB3 LGA 1156
Processor: Intel Core i-5 760
Ram: 2 x 4GB Ripjaw series DDR3 1333 mhz
VideoCard: ATI HD 5670
PowerSupply: OCZ 700W ModXtremePro
HardDrive: Seagate barracuda 7200.12 500GB
DVD: Standard DVD with lightscribe.

I also have a wifi card and a firewire card. Every thing is new.

 

[ekoostik]

What does your manual say? I believe all of the 1156 Gigabyte boards expect you to put 1 or 2 sticks in slots 1 and 3. If you add a 3rd or 4th stick, then you'd use slots 2 and/or 4.

 

[whitefang]

So did I just return the motherboard for no reason? O:

 

[ekoostik]

Oh. Nah, if you returned it I'm sure it was broken. Did you swap it for a new one? Or did you pick up a different model?

 

[whitefang]

Same one, they wouldn't let me change it unless I wanted to wait 2 weeks O:

 

[ekoostik]

Is it working any differently? Everything going ok?

 

[whitefang]

Nope, new motherboard and same ploblem. and you were right about it being slot 1, 3 for dual channel.

But shouldn't I be able to install it in the other channel (2, 4) and it work too? it just does a continous beep again. So I'm guessing the second channel won't enable itself unless you have more then two sticks? If not I'm screwed because this is a computer I'm selling to some one tomorrow.

 

[ekoostik]

Correct, it's not meant to work with RAM just in slots two and/or four. Best way to test for sure is stick a third and/or fourth stick in those slots. Got any other sticks you can use to test? Once you add other (more than 2) sticks you often have to give it a little more juice too, for example if it doesn't work try setting the QPI/Vtt to 1.15V.

 

[whitefang]

Well I'm starting to think the random restarts weren't originally caused by having the ram not in the right channels (I had stick 1 in dimm 1, and stick 2 in dimm 2) and I would login to windows and after about 30 seconds to a minute it would crash. (definitely having the ram in the wrong dimm's for dual channel caused instant crash)

I did what you said, put my ram in from my personal computer and all ran fine for a good 30 mins, so I took my ram out and concluded that the 2nd channel is disabled unless you have 3, or 4 pieces of ram. However now with just 2 sticks of ram (In dimm 1, and 3) after about 2 hours it locked up and windows did not respond, every thing was frozen. This was definitely different then when the ram was not in the right slots, because then it froze almost instantly.

I'm thinking this might be a problem with the processor because when I first built the computer a twistie tie got caught in the cpu fan and caused it to stop, the heat sensors went off and shut down the PC. I checked the cpu for damage (Any dark heat spots on the processor) and it seemed fine. I don't think the cpu was damaged because I had the automatic shut down for heat at 60C in my bios which should be fine.

What do you think is the problem?

 

[ekoostik]

Hm. The heat shut-off should have caused it to shutdown before any damage occurred. No guarantees of course.

When you say it froze, what exactly happened? Is it that you could see whatever was on the screen but couldn't move the mouse and the keyboard didn't work?

What changes, if any, have you made in the BIOS?
What software have you installed?
Check the Event Viewer and look for any errors or warnings around the time of the freeze. Anything in there?

If you haven't done so yet, at some point you should run memtest86+ on the machine to verify the RAM (doesn't test for stability, but does a thorough test for errors), best to let it run overnight: http://www.memtest.org/