Asus P5K-SE EPU - memory incompatibility

[Sectoid]

Hello guys,

I'm having a hard time with memory compatibility. In the middle of the year I built a PC for my girlfriend. The build was as follows:

Asus P5K-SE / EPU
Core 2 quad Q6600
4x1GB OCZ Platinum 2 Revision 2 4-4-4-15@2.1v
Seventeam 420w or 550w power supply (can't remember)
9600GT

Absolutely NO OC.
All temps are low and all voltages are ok (< 5% variation, usually less).
The machine is rarely put on stress. 99,9999% of the time it's used for reasonable multitasking (outlook, firefox, programming environments like visual studio, eclipse).

Sometimes Vista 32 would give random BSODs, which made me suspect the memories. Those sticks worked perfectly in my machine though, so I then suspected the problem lied with the timings between the motherboard and the memories. For WEEKS I fought with it trying every possible combination of sticks, timings and memory voltages, and I found that it would work OK with only 2 sticks, either at 5-5-5-15@1.8v or 4-4-4-15@2.1v. It was not 100% perfect, it still gave BSODs but very rarely. What I couldn't find was if the real problem were the four sticks or the fours gigs of memory.

I proceeded then to try another brand, and bought 2x2GB Markvision (A-Data chips), with hopes that a less exigent memory would solve the problem. At stock, 5-5-5-18@1.8v, the memories pass as much memtest passes as you throw at them. No errors whatsoever. But then, Vista 32 continues to BSOD (at least once per day) randomly or programs just crash without reason. Up to now what I tried was uninstalling Asus EPU program, flashing the BIOS to the latest and upping the mem voltage to 1.9v, but it didn't help.

I don't know what else to do, it seems that this board is a POS that doesn't work with any memory. I'm already pulling my (already thin) hair off! The only other suspect I can come up with is that maybe files got corrupted and I need a (I don't want to say this) full system format & restore.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[YearZero]

If I could venture a guess, if you say that you tested the memory in memtest exhaustively - forget about the memory being the cuplrit here.
There must be something else causing the problem!

 

[Sectoid]

I just gathered some more info:

1) it seems that a lot of intel chipsets (mostly P35, various board manufacturers) have problems with 4gb in dual channel, on any operating system (read some problems on a mac forum). Some people report having 100% stability after changing to single channel or going down to 3gb or less.
2) others report that disabling "memory remap" feature in BIOS also helps. This feature is intended for 64-bit systems.

My girlfriend just got home and she said memory remap was enabled, so I asked her to turn it off and we'll see how it goes. If it still leads to errors, I'll try the single channel route.

 

[Sectoid]

I'm still having the same problems, but I don't have much time to look into this

- memory remap off didn't help
- single channel made her get less BSODs and application crashes than before, but they still happen frequently
- tried disabling any speedstep and c1e features, also didn't help
- new BIOS came on, nothing again

I made some more memory tests within Windows now so I could keep track of the voltages. Even with 100% CPU use and almost all memory devoted to testing (I used four instances of memtest for windows), no errors were found and the voltages kept steady and within bounds.
This really points away from memory (and power supply as well) as YearZero suggested. This led to the speedstep, c1e and new bios testings, none of which solved the problems as I said.

I can only think of 2 possible culprits now:

1) HDD (but then I wouldn't be getting totally ramdom BSOD's would I?)
2) Some bad driver, but all of them are at the latest version (the ones that didn't come with Windows and I had to install manually).

Please, any help would be appreciated!

 

[antonisg]

Hey guys,

was searching the net for a solution to my problem and it got me here.

Did you finally find a solution about the RAM problem? I've been searching all over but no luck so far.

I have the exact same problem for more than a year now, I've been working with 2 GB and I get no BSODs but it's a shame to have 2GB just sitting there.


Thanks for any help.

 

[Sectoid]

antonisg, sorry to say, but the trouble really is incompatibility. I sold the board and bought a Gigabyte board, same memory, BAM, problem solved. No more problems ever since. The board is a GA-EP43-DS3L if I recall it correctly, and I think I kept the Markvision modules on it (the OCZ ones went to other rigs).

Asus boards are crap, I don't buy these for myself for a lot of years now, I only let my gf buy it because it was the only one with good specs that her money could buy. Well the price was way, WAY higher in time and stress, for both her and me. If the money is not enough, don't go with Asus, just buy a lesser-spec'ed PC. Once upon a time, when I still trusted Asus, I assembled 10 pcs with Asus boards (6-8 were -X crappy series, but the rest were top), and 8, really, EIGHT had varied problems, including the top ones. Not a single one was refurbished or anything, and some were bought from different places. They just produce/sell so much that they can't have a reliable testing procedure. Of course, a lot of their boards work good, but it's like the X-BOX 360... I simply won't risk it anymore.

As for recommendations for others, I also stopped recommending the Core 2 architecture (based on my findings of P35 incompatibility galore, with any brand). I've since helped bring to life many different AMD combinations, all perfect. I still also recommend the Core I7 architecture, because since the memory controller now resides within the processor, I figure the compatibility is independent of the board (the same AMD does for some years now). Again, there's a lot of Core 2 that work, it's just that I'm not willing to put up with the high risk anymore.

Best of luck to you!