Asus P4S533 memory issues

[raskren]

Hi everyone and Merry Christmas. I hope you all got what you asked for. I got a brand new stick of GeiL DDR400 Ultra memory (256 mb) for Christmas. I have having stability issues running two sticks of this memory (GeiL 256MB PC 3200 DDR CL=2-6-3-3) at the same time. Below is an email that I sent to Asus tech support detailing the problem, it brings up a few other issues as well. Can anyone help me?


I have been running one stick of 256mb GeiL DDR400 memory in my Asus P4S533 motherboard. I just got another stick of the exact same memory and I run into serious stability issues. I have set all chipset settings back to ?auto? or very conservative timings and I am running the fsb at the normal clockspeed (133 Mhz). The computer will POST and it will occasionally boot into Windows XP Pro but I usually get a blue screen very shortly after startup or during startup. The motherboard manual says that the board will only support 4 banks of PC2700 memory. I only have two sticks of memory so would that count as more than 4 banks? I have also tried placing the memory sticks in different slots and there is no one combination that will work. Currently, I am using the NEW stick of memory by itself (without any stability problems) so I am certain that it is not new memory that is bad. What could I be doing wrong here?

Another question: Is there any way to keep the PCI/AGP clock at 33/66 mhz respectively, while overclocking the front side bus? I can't seem to find any multiplier adjustment for the PCI/AGP clock in the bios setup.

One more question: Q-fan? According to the marketing material for this motherboard, it will automatically control fan speed based on the load that is present. Where do the fans have to be plugged into to use this functionality? I assume that it is the 3-pin connectors on the motherboard, but all my case fans use 4-pin molex connectors. Also, I am using a ThermalTake smartfan on top of a Swiftech heatsink. The fan will go anywhere from 1500 to 5000 rpm, but at 5000 rpm it is drawing .7 amps of power. I read that typical 3-pin connectors should only supply .4 amps or less. Is this correct? I certainly do not want to fry my motherboard by drawing too many amps.

Thanks for your help. Priority #1 right now is getting this memory to work.
-Richard

 

[dbwillis]

Welcome to the forums!

not sure about the memory problem, some people have luck with Geil, some have horrible results, maybe try running memtest86 on each stick?
There is also no PCI/AGP lock on the p4s533 (sis chips) boards, only on the p4b533 (intel chips) boards.....

 

[raskren]

I was going to comment on how much more stable my computer is now, but it crashed on my first attempt at writing this message...ugh!

I think that a major source of instability was the C-Media integrated sound. Often times the blue screen would reference the sound driver (cmedia.sys or something similar). I installed a Sound Blaster Live! PCI card and disabled onboard sound in the BIOS and the system is a little more stable.

The system will not run for long with the cpu/memory divider at 4:6. With one stick of ram (256 mb) I can run the divider at 4:6 (which runs the DDR memory at 200mhz) and then overclock the fsb to 149 mhz. The should run the memory at 224. The system was rock solid at these settings which is why I don't understand why this is happening now. I lowered the divider to 4:5 which at least allows Windows to boot. The system is still unstable even with the fsb at 133 mhz. I am running the ram at 1.7 volts. I have the option of running at up to 1.9 volts, but this is beyond what the memory specs allow; 1.8 volts is the max GeiL recommends. Would it be too dangerous to up the voltage to 1.9v?

Often times when the computer crashes anymore, it references the driver win32k.sys. Anyone know what this driver does? I am running Windows XP Pro with service pack 1 and all available updates. As I mentioned before, I am using an Asus P4s533 mobo, Pentium 4 2.26ghz cpu (533mhz fsb)(cooled with Swiftech 462U), two 256mb sticks of GeiL ddr400 memory (residing in the slots closest to the cpu, Visiontek Geforce 2 Ti video, two Western Digital 7200rpm 40gb hard drives, two optical drives, and a vanilla SB Live! sound card...this is all powered by an Antec smartpower 400 watt power supply.

Under Windows XP pro both drives are formatted as NTFS and the drives are listed as dynamic. I have a boot partition with only windows on it, which is about 2.5 gb in size. The remainder of the space on that drive and the second hard drive are striped. I wonder if this could be source of instability as well?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

[raskren]

dbwillis,

I removed the known good stick of ram (leaving only the bad one) and ran memtest86. The memory was set to run at ddr333 speed (default for this board) and the fsb was not overclocked. Memtest86 ran a few tests but did not finish as it locked during one of them. I tried booting with the suspect memory only which was clocked at ddr266 (really slow!). Even at this speed any processor intensive activity causes a blue screen in windows. Why this didn't happen before, I don't know!? The problem seems to be getting worse, so I guess I'm sending this memory back.

I went back to my original configuration which is one stick of GeiL DDR400 memory running a 4:6 divider with the fsb clocked to 149mhz. According to my calculations, that puts the memory at 223.5 mhz or ddr447. The system is rock solid at this speed (memory running at 2.7v). The best Sandra memory bandwidth score I have seen is ~3340 mb/s. Not too shabby.