- Jan 14, 2003
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I recently was lucky enough to get in on the Newegg Farcry combo and have an A64 2800+ & Abit KV8 to show for it. Upon initially setting up the system (w/120GB WD SE HD, old Lite-on 163D dvd drive, 420W TT PS, and an old generic 512MB DDR266 dimm - i.e. other than the PS, stuff I had lying around), I had no problems and everything seemed rock solid (no oc, used Sandra's burn-in feature overnight after build). This box has been humming along nicely now for week.
Yesterday i stuck a 512MB Spectek DDR333 dimm from another system into the box and it started acting up a little. The board would beep sometimes on restarts or exiting BIOS (couldn't ID the beep error codes nor the little LED number error codes). Funny thing (or not so funny) is that it would boot into XP and run firefox or office stuff (i.e. low load stuff) with no problems. If I started anything more intensive (i.e. Farcry, EQ), it would crash back to the desktop after a few minutes. Bad DIMM it would seem. But after running memtest for 2 hours on each dimm singly, I got no errors. Also, the system didn't seem to have any of these problems with just 1 DIMM installed (didn't matter which one, tried each one alone). So I proceeded to try the DIMMs together in different slots to no avail (DIMMs in 1 & 2 wouldn't boot, DIMMs in 1&3 or 2&3 would boot and run a bit but crash under load). I checked on the memory timings in BIOS and it seems to have defaulted to the lower speed DIMMs SPD settings for both DIMMs (running at 266), which is what I expected it to do. Voltages and temps (according to Abit's monitoring utility) all seem within spec.
So I guess my questions are:
Theoretically, one should be able to run two different speed DIMMs at the lower DIMMs' settings, right? But in practice is this actually not so straightforward? Would I have more success with a pair of DDR333 or a pair DDR266 DIMMs? Or should I just play with the memory timings (relax them further) and see what happens? Also, I've heard that the A64 mbs are pickier about their memory, but I was under the impression that that was the cutting edge stuff, not the older slower stuff. Perhaps I'm wrong in assuming that? Has anyone run into anything like this?
TIA for any help. It might just be something specific to this board so I'll try Abit's forums as well but if anyone has any thoughts to offer, it would be greatly appreciated. I can live with 512MB, but as I like to do a lot of multi-tasking, I'd love to have 1024.
EDIT: forgot to mention, XP w/ SP1
Yesterday i stuck a 512MB Spectek DDR333 dimm from another system into the box and it started acting up a little. The board would beep sometimes on restarts or exiting BIOS (couldn't ID the beep error codes nor the little LED number error codes). Funny thing (or not so funny) is that it would boot into XP and run firefox or office stuff (i.e. low load stuff) with no problems. If I started anything more intensive (i.e. Farcry, EQ), it would crash back to the desktop after a few minutes. Bad DIMM it would seem. But after running memtest for 2 hours on each dimm singly, I got no errors. Also, the system didn't seem to have any of these problems with just 1 DIMM installed (didn't matter which one, tried each one alone). So I proceeded to try the DIMMs together in different slots to no avail (DIMMs in 1 & 2 wouldn't boot, DIMMs in 1&3 or 2&3 would boot and run a bit but crash under load). I checked on the memory timings in BIOS and it seems to have defaulted to the lower speed DIMMs SPD settings for both DIMMs (running at 266), which is what I expected it to do. Voltages and temps (according to Abit's monitoring utility) all seem within spec.
So I guess my questions are:
Theoretically, one should be able to run two different speed DIMMs at the lower DIMMs' settings, right? But in practice is this actually not so straightforward? Would I have more success with a pair of DDR333 or a pair DDR266 DIMMs? Or should I just play with the memory timings (relax them further) and see what happens? Also, I've heard that the A64 mbs are pickier about their memory, but I was under the impression that that was the cutting edge stuff, not the older slower stuff. Perhaps I'm wrong in assuming that? Has anyone run into anything like this?
TIA for any help. It might just be something specific to this board so I'll try Abit's forums as well but if anyone has any thoughts to offer, it would be greatly appreciated. I can live with 512MB, but as I like to do a lot of multi-tasking, I'd love to have 1024.
EDIT: forgot to mention, XP w/ SP1
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