Stabilizing Legacy Mobo

[redraike]

Hello everyone;

My system was completely stable and working fine until I decided to upgrade my GFX card and RAM. I immediately started having problems. The old RAM was 2x2GB DDR2-800 5-5-5-12 Patriot and I installed 4x2G DDR2-1066 5-5-5-15 Gskill Trident. My BIOS wants to run it at 5-7-7-20. I had to manually set it to the mfg. rated CAS Latency.

I ran Memtest86+ for 8 hours and had no errors pop up on 6 passes so I think the 4 sticks of RAM I bought is fine, but Prime95 keeps giving me a rounding error message "FATAL ERROR: Rounding was 0.5, expected less than 0.4" after 1 hour and 5 minutes every time. My Core Temps never exceed 48° C.

I decided to upgrade my BIOS from F4 to F6 (the most recent version) and then applied the exact same settings described in bilbat's instructions that I found here (not OC'd):

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/264889-30-help-finding-memory-ep35-ds3l

The only change to those settings in the link that I made was to manually set the RAM timings to 5-5-5-15, and the automatic voltages have it running at 2.08v which puts everything within the 2.0-2.1 mfg stock specifications for the RAM. This has allowed me to run Prime95 for 2 - 4 hours without rounding errors - but never more than 4 hours.

As far as I can tell the machine is not running OC'd and voltages are being set automatically. Vcore is within recommended range (1.184v), the range is between 0.85v and 1.362v.

My Computer is about 4 years old, but is still pretty serviceable. Here are the specs:

Mobo EP35-DS3L
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00GHz (Core Speed 3005.8 MHz)
Multiplier x FSB 9.0 x 334.0 MHz
Rated Bus speed 1335.9 MHz
OS 64-Bit Windows 7
GFX card AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series
RAM 4x 2G Gskill Trident DDR2-1066 PC2-8500 5-5-5-15 (F2-8500CL5D-4GBPI-B x2)

Here are the voltages and temps *under load*
Voltage 0 1.17 Volts (CPU VCORE)
Voltage 1 2.05 Volts (DDR)
Voltage 2 3.28 Volts (+3.3V)
Voltage 3 4.87 Volts (+5V)
Voltage 7 12.16 Volts [0xBE] (+12V)
Voltage 8 3.23 Volts (VBAT)
Temperature 0 31°C (87°F) (System)
Temperature 1 35°C (95°F) (CPU)
Fan 0 1548 RPM (FANIN0)
GFX Card Voltage 0 0.82 Volts (VIN0)
GFX Card Temperature 0 29°C (84°F) (TMPIN0)

Timers
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

ACPI timer 3.580 MHz
HPET timer 14.318 MHz
Perf timer 2.936 MHz
Sys timer 1.000 KHz

 

[kitsunestarwind]

Just for the sake of trying
Let the Ram run at the value's the BIOS want's to run it at. Ram timings can greatly affect stability
so it's worth a shot

 

[redraike]

Might there be some reason that Gskill RAM wouldn't work at the advertised CAS Latency?

 

[redraike]

OK - ran Prime95 with the RAM at 5-7-7-20 and tracker #2 cut out after 4 hours. Tracker #1 was still going after 8 hours.

Do I seriously have to increase the DDR voltage above spec (2.2v?) to get it to run stable at the standard 5-5-5-15?

 

[redraike]

I noticed that the automatic setting for the DRAM has changed itself to 5-5-5-15 which is good, I think.

I bumped up my 3.0GHz to a 3.20GHz and kept the Vcore setting at automatic. I noticed that it is now climbing slightly every time I fire up the machine. It started at 1.81, sat at 1.36, and now it's climbing past 1.47 and is currently at 1.55.

Specs say it should run at 1.36 - why does the auto Vcore keep increasing???