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Dual Channel RDRAM @ Full 1066 Speed

nenforcer

nenforcer

Golden Member
Has anyone ever successfully run a dual channel Intel D850E chipset based board with both channels at 1066 speeds?

I previously posted a thread in the Operating Systems forum regarding my crashing from desktop in Windows XP Home which I thought was related to Hyperthreading being enabled.

Well it turns out the board will still crash with Hyperthreading disabled and even in Safe Mode.

I'm now on my second Intel D850EMVR board and its still crashing and putting itself in a rebooting loop typically right after turning the machine on.

This board is a bit more stable than the last however since once it does seem to "warm" up it runs on end.

I have run all my 1 GIG (256MB X 4 Samsung 1066-32P) memory chips through MemtestX86 and they all pass.

I'm really at a loss why I can't get this board to be stable. I've tried just about all of the BIOS tweaks related to power settings that the Intel BIOS allows, which isn't much, and am running out of ideas.

Again these are all 7-8 year old used parts now so is it possible one of the RAM chips is bad? Should I drop down to 2X256MB Rambus RDRAM Dimm's and install 2 CRIMM's?

For some reason I think its memory related because of the way it just drops out. Again, after a few reboots I can get it stable in Windows but this is a total pain.
Could it be power supply related? I don't see how since I can eventually get it stable.
 
Well a couple of details I left out as I've been fighting this for 2 months.

I'm running the fastest Intel chip for this board, the 3.06GHz 533FSB Northwood with all DIMM slots fully populated.

I dropped down to 2 RDRAM DIMM's and it still crashed on me.

I just got the impression this was somehow electrical related the way it would shut off spontaneously.

One thing I also noticed was that I could get it to crash on demand by either turning on the USB printer or plugging in my USB flash drive.

Turns out by going into BIOS and disabling the "Hi-Speed USB" the board now appears to run completely stable.

This board is old enough they tacked on a NEC EHCI USB 2.0 Hi-speed controller and for some reason, on two different boards, it does not appear to function properly with this CPU and RAM when the USB 2.0 is enabled.

I'm running USB 1.1 speeds and the board now works fine and I can shut it off properly.

What a total pain, I did all sorts of google searches on this board I'm really surprised no one else has seen this issue.
 
Have you tried a different power supply? I had an Asus P4T 533C w/Rdram/3.06 chip and one day it just started turning itself off. It turned out to be the power supply after much testing, it was a power hungry setup. I miss using the dip switches to overclock it though......fun times.
 
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I've got a 6-7 year old Antec 350W SmartPower SmartBlue power supply that apparently can supply 16A on the 12V rail. Is this to little do you think?

Every time I think I've got this thing fixed it still crashes on me.

I've got a 400W supply here in a weaker powered machine I'm going to swap it with.
 
According to Intel the 3.06 drew 9.7 amps off of the 12v rail itself so if you have a generic 300 or 400 watt ps then that will leave little room for anything else, which can cause hard locks and spontaneous reboots during heavy loads and with all the other hardware, such as the amount of hard drives etc. you may have in your system, it may no longer cut it. If I remember correctly a 500 watt ps was recommended for the 3.06 Northwood, depending on the manufacturer of course and other hardware in the box (such as Rdram).

This old thread below may guide you some.

http://www.abxzone.com/forums/f149/p4-3-06-ht-big-power-31117.html
 
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Cool thank you for the background info, it was the power supply.

This is the first system I've built which has been underpowered I thought I would only have to worry about that if I had a Prescott not these Northwood's.

I swapped it with another Antec 350W power supply and it is working just fine. Apparently the Blue LED fan in the other power supply put it over the top!

I am going to purchase a newer, 430W+ PCI-E based power supply to make this case / system future proof.
 
Great! Glad you've got it worked out. I still have that old rig too and it still runs just fine thank you very much, I'll have make a it a media server or something.
 
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I had the same board and was only able to run all 4 sticks (4 X 256) at 800 mhz and if I recall correctly I had Hitachi RDRAM. But in it's day it was very fast and I loved it. Gave the computer a way a couple of years ago. I had a 2.66 P4 processor in the thing.
 
Yeah this is my Mom's computer and she's on a retirement budget so I've upgraded her from a P3 1GHz S370 Coppermine to this using all of her old Windows XP software.

This thing can play 720P Youtube which she couldn't do before so hopefully will last her for 2-3 years before XP is retired and I have a Core 2 Duo hand me down to give her by then.
 
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