Athlon 64 questions

[alembic5]

Ok, here is the scoop. I bought my new Athlon 64 3200+ and a gigabyte K8VNXP motherboard. Installed it all with a brand new 530 watt Fortron PSU and a stick of 512 MB Kingston pc2700 value RAM. Ran great! Bumped the FSB up to 206, dead stable. A week later, my new stick of 512 MB OCZ performance series 2-3-3-6 pc3200 shows up. Beautiful! I throw it in, and blam! Blue screen. I reset the FSB to 200 (stock) and she fires up, dead stable. If I try to push it even 1 MHz over stock, the system becomes unstable. WTF? I suspected weak power due to my 10,000 RPM hard drives and numerous fans (also low readings on the software monitor) so I pulled out my multimeter to double check. All of my voltages are almost perfect... quite strong! I have the latest bios and a fresh install of XP pro. Any ideas?? Also, I can't find anywhere in the bios to adjust memory timings. Does anyone else have this board? I ran memtest to make sure the ram is good, and got zero errors. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

 

[McArra]

Did you relax timings?

 

[charloscarlies]

On my K8N Pro you can't adjust timings really at all. Must be a Giga-byte thing. You may either have a bad stick of ram or one that just doesn't seem to like your board. I would try another brand and see if that helps

 

[alembic5]

There is no place to relax the timings... that was my one major disappointment to an otherwise great board. I was running my kingston pc2700 valueRAM at about 206 FSB dead stable. Thats why this is baffling me so...

 

[vanln]

I have a k8n-pro , AMD 64 3000+, 350watt enermax pw . Here is my result with kingston Value ram PC2700
Stable with Hynix 512m AT D-43 chip @ 210 fsb (2.9volt) above that , ooopss no go
Stable with 256m winbond BH-6 ( yes it is winbond with winbond logo) @ 225 fsb (2.9volt) above that don't know. my cpu stable only at 225 fsb
Stabls with winbond 256m xxx ( yes it is winbond with kingston logo) @ 225 fsb (2.9volt) above that don't know. my cpu stable only at 225 fsb
strange thing is this stick is double sided
No go with 2 sticks add on . Tried to move around in difference slot , but no go above 200mhz fsb
only stable with 1 stick with winbond logo and a stick corsair winbond ch-5 @ 223fsb
timming can not be done with gigaboard . Cas 3.0 is not an option on this board. This is a serious complain to gigabyte from me

 

[alembic5]

Hmmm, interesting. I only have 1 stick of RAM currently, so that is not the problem... are there any software utilities to see what my RAM timings are, seeing as how it is not given in the BIOS? I'm curious to see if the board is running it at the specs it should be running at. Thanks! I may try bumping my DDR voltage a bit and see if that helps...

 

[charloscarlies]

You can use cpu-z...it shows your ram timings. Also...is your board an nf3 chipset? I can't seem to remember and don't feel like looking it up. If it is...there is a nvidia utility you can download that allows you to mess with some of the ram timings. It won't let you change cas though.

 

[alembic5]

No, it is the Via K8T800 chipset. I didn't realize CPU-Z did that... I'll check it out. Thanks!

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Did increasing the vDIMM help? I would also increase the LDT/HT voltage if need be.

 

[alembic5]

I have yet to mess with the voltages... won't be home again until sunday. Its just strange to me that I would need to up the voltage to even get 1 or 2 mhz faster FSB. I'll give it a shot on sunday and let you know what happens!

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Some are having to increase vDIMM just to get their ram to run it's rated speed so it's not uncommon.