Asus A7N8X (not deluxe)

[phazed]

Has anyone had any trouble with these boards being unstable with the ram at 166mhz?

Here's the setup:
Asus A7N8X rev2.0 (nforce2 - ultra400 chipset - most recent BIOS)
Corsair TwinX PC2700 (256mb X 2 - 2-2-2-5-T1)
AMD Athlon XP 2500+ (Barton - 333FSB)

If I run the ram in single or dual channel mode at 166Mhz, I get all sorts of errors when I run memtest x86 (test 5 is the only one that generates errors). It also crashes memory intensive apps/games. If I set the ram timings to aggressive (shouldn't corsair be able to handle it?), the errors generated is in the thousands!!! If I set it to optimal timings, it ends up generating a few hundred errors. I've tried turning on the spread spectrum (.50% and 1%) and each generates fewer errors still... The *only* way I can run stable (and memtest doesn't generate errors) is if I clock the RAM to 80% (so it runs at 133Mhz).

I have already RMA'd the ram once and gotten a new pair of DIMMS and it happened again... I've already got an RMA set up for the motherboard, but I'm looking for input or experiences.

Thanks

 

[mechBgon]

Set the DIMM voltage to 2.7V, if you haven't tried that yet. Welcome to the Forums, by the way

 

[phazed]

Well... I set the DIMM voltage to 2.7 and the error count went to hundreds instead of thousands... I turned on the spread spectrum to .5% and it dropped to around 50... I set it to 2.8, turned on the spread spectrum to 1% and it was under 20.

I checked the Corsair boards and the spec sheet for the ram and it says it will run on the A7N8X with default settings (incl. default voltage). Some other people were complaining about the same thing and what they had done to eliminate the instability was simply to relax the timings to 2-3-3-6-2T. I did the same thing and the ram is now completely error free.

At this point, I'm just happy it works... but I really don't like the fact that I paid for low latency ram which is qualified by the ram vendor to work at those timings-- yet it does not. If I had known this was going to be an issue, I would have just bought two 512MB sticks at 2.5CL and saved myself the hassle of RMA'ing the first set of dimms and all the troubleshooting that went along with it.

Thanks for yer help