Asus P5K with 4gb ram

[kentsfield]

Im getting asus p5k board and im wondering if any of you has any experience with it? Im a little woried if my 4x 1 gb patriot ddr2 800 will work. I have ds3 board now and i keep getting one error with memtest. I tried everything: latest bios, raised ddr2 and northbridge voltage, relaxed timings, setting ram to 667mhz, 1:1 ratio and nothing helps. With only 2x1 gb i allways pass memtest, so the ram isn`t a problem. I guess the board has issues with 4 sticks.

 

[Peter]

... or the DIMMs are overloading the common bus. Your experiments aren't ruling out a bad DIMM, actually.

 

[ginfest]

Could be a problem with the board or one of the DIMMs as Peter said.
FWIW I'm running 4x1GB GSkill "HZ" sticks on my P5K Premium at 450mhz/2.0 VDimm/all chipset voltages "auto" and 4-4-4-12 timings and haven't had any problems.

 

[kentsfield]

I tried every dimm combination possible (with two and four sticks) and test it overnight. It took me a while. Well im about to sell my ds3. Im done testing for now i spent almost one week and i can`t take it any more it`s driving me crazy. I just orderd a new board (p5k) I hope it works well. Will see monday.

Ginfest: What bios version do you use? I was reading on asus forum that lots of guys have problems with the board. That`s why im a little worried.

 

[ginfest]

I'm running BIOS 204, came with the baord, there are only 2 official for the Premium board and one 302 beta
I've read about the problems that some are having with the SATA2 controller and certain harddrives, specifically WD branded , but I haven't had any trouble.
All my drives are Seagate SATA2 and they all test out in spec on HD Tach/HD Tune

 

[kentsfield]

I have WD hard drive (SATA2) and NEC ide optical drive. I didn`t notice before that you have premium board. Im getting vanilla. Probably even more chance of compatibility issues.

 

[lopri]

I was surprised to find out myself that Intel chipset boards were not great at handling 4 DIMMs. I wonder if it has anything to do with board makers' competition to top the performance charts or this on-going race for the highest FSB title. Interestingly the best board that handled 4 sticks of DIMMs (even when mixed with sticks of different ICs) for me has been EVGA 680i. It's handled every configuration that I've thrown at so far (2GB/4GB/6GB/8GB with Micron/Promos/Infineon ICs)

http://img125.imageshack.us/my...mage=8gbmemtestvt5.jpg

(The pic says 3600MHz but it's actually Q6600 running @3200MHz. Memory is at DDR2-800/4-3-3-9/2.0V)

 

[SerpentRoyal]

No problem running four sticks of DDR2 800 Kingston N5 ValueRAM at 576MHz. PC is Abit IP35-E. Best clock speed with two modules is 580MHz at 2.1V and 5-5-5-18-2T timing.

 

[kentsfield]

I finally got the board and took the time to build the rig once again. After reading all the horror stories on asus forum about P5K (vanilla), I really wasn`t to excited. So i flashed the latest bios and installed all the latest driver and the board is working perfectly (knock on wood). I ran memtest for ten hours over night with my 4x1 gb ddr2 800mhz patriot with no errors. Im really pleased with the new board. The only thing that bugs me is the volt drop. Setting the vcore to 1.3V in bios results in 1.23V in windows (idle) and 1.18 (load). It`s all right for now since im not planning to overclock my cpu just yet. Im hoping that new bios will fix that but i doubt it.

 

[piasabird]

I have heard on these newer motherboards that 2 dimms are better than four and the memory access is faster.