can't use both sticks of RAM

[Niflheim]

Ok yay.
I bought 2gb of DDR2 this morning, two sticks of one gigabyte.. I used to have a stick of 512mb and a stick of 1gb of DDR1 RAM.
I can't use DDR1 and DDR2 at the same time, so I removed the old memory, but the two new sticks and started the computer.

It was pretty bad actually. The RAM is detected and all, but if I start a game or a program, the CPU usage flies to around 100% and stays there (Firefox for example taks about one minute to start and sets the cpu usage to 60%).
That is annoying.

As some people said here(http://forums.anandtech.com/me...d=2137943&STARTPAGE=1),
I removed one the sticks and tried booting up. All worked. I could play games and start as many programs at the same time as I wanted, but on only 1gb of RAM of course. I tried running on the other stick alone, and it worked too. But when I put the 2 of them together, it DOES NOT COMPUTE.

What is this? Can it be fixed? Is it my mobo the problem?

So if I run on either of the stick alone, everything works.
If I put both the sticks on the motherboard, it doesn't work, but it did work when I was on DDR1.



Motherboard is ECS P4M890T-M2, cheap but works (usually).

Thanks!

 

[chizow]

If you're running the latest BIOS then its probably a problem with the board. If you're not running the latest BIOS, update to the latest BIOS with only 1 stick installed. After updating, boot again to make sure everything is OK, then power down, insert second stick and boot up again.

 

[Niflheim]

I do have the latest bios, alas. I tried to memtest86+ both of the sticks, one at a time then the two together. No errors.
So that has to be the mobo? How sad. I was thinking about buying a new one anyways. I always thought mine was lowering my performance.

 

[The-Noid]

are there any voltage settings on that board. Could be with the chipset it just needs a tad more voltage +.05 to +.1 from stock to run at full speed.

 

[Niflheim]

For a second I had a hope. I had noticed such settings in the BIOS but didn't quite know what to do with it.
I tried +0.05, 0.10 and 0.15, but it didn't change anything

oyoyoy

 

[jha1223]

Just out of curiosity ... what kind of memory? Is it double sided? I know in some motherboard manuals, I remember seeing some odd allowable configurations with single and double sided memory.

 

[Mondoman]

Unfortunately, such things are to be expected from ECS motherboards. On my related ECS MB, when using DDR2 everything is fine with one stick, but with two sticks I had to drop the memory bus speed to DDR2-400 from DDR2-533 in order to get it stable.