Dual channel causing instability?

[Baronz]

After a few months of running my system on single channel DDR with two sticks of Kingston Hyperx Pc2700 512mb ram, I realized that i actually had it in a single channel configuration.

Today I switched one of the sticks to the correct slots, and then noticed the "dual channel" in bios, great, wish they told me that was using SC before

With dual channel, my system is very unstable, BSODs after awhile and random reboots when trying to load 3dmark and random explorer crapouts, same symptoms of bad ram.

I switched back to single chan to make sure that this was the problem, and with single I'm rock stable and able to do everything I was doing before no problem.

So setting my ram to a dual channel config obviously did something that made my system unstable.

My ram is actually downclocked to 280 fsb, as its pc2700 ram and my cpu is not a 333mhz athlon. But the CPU is overclocked.

My board is an epox 8rda+ with an Xp2400 tbred. at 2370mhz, voltage is at 1.85.

My RAM timings are also 2-3-3-6.

Could any of these things have to do with instability using dual chan? I'm thinking it may be the timing and/or voltages. What about RAM voltages?

I know the benefits of dual chan arent that impressive but nonetheless i'd like to figure this out.

Anyone have any ideas on this problem? TIA.

 

[MasterHoss]

Try messing around with your RAM timings... make sure that everything is on the up and up in dual channel mode... start with the most conservative RAM timings and work your way from there.

BTW... your 8rda+ says "dual channel" upon boot when you have DIMMs populating slots 1 and 2???

 

[Cerb]

It shouldn't be voltage, as that should have nothing to do with single/dual channel changes.
However, you might want to try 3-3-3-7 2T and see how it does, then begin lowering it.

 

[sman789]

i think its voltages, my PC would restart randomly always within 5 minutes from bootup.
put the memory in single channel and it ran fine.
Back in dual channel and raised the voltage and rock stable for a few weeks

 

[Viper96720]

Try cas 2.5 with everything stock see if it's ok then try overclocking the cpu.

 

[Baronz]

Originally posted by: MasterHoss

BTW... your 8rda+ says "dual channel" upon boot when you have DIMMs populating slots 1 and 2???

Yes I believe thats a feature of the newer BIOS, older versions didn't show if it was on.

Thanks for the replies, I'll try messing around with timings and voltage and see if something works.

 

[TheBoyBlunder]

Is your board a revision 2.0?

 

[Baronz]

Fixed the problem.

I tried setting the timings back, didnt work, DIMM voltage didnt work either.

I eventually reset all the overclocking to default, including timings.

I started up at default, everything worked fine.

Then I went back and re-overclocked, lowered the timings to 2-5-5-5 (they were higher before because I was overclocking and forgot).

So it was probably something with the ram timings being too high? I dont know.

It could also have been some weird thing with me switching to dual chan while overclocked, and having to reset to default before overclocking again. But I dont know.

I believe the board is version 1.0 but i could be wrong.