Gigabyte 7VRXP - cant fit 2 RAM sticks

[Skiman]

Greetings guys, im new here, so please be patient with me -

i havent come across a problem like this before. Hopefully, someone here can suggest a solution.

Ive recently bought a g4 ti4400 and as a result, i swapped my V1.1 7VRXP board (running the GF3 with 512M PC2700 with no probs) to a V2.0 board (because of the advertised GF4 probs).

So the upgraded system has:

GA7VRXP V2.0 F7
1.8G XP with Volcano 7+
2 x 256M Kingmax PC2700
X-Micro GF4 Ti4400 @ AGP 4X
350W Aopen PSU
HDD's, CDR/W's, Sound etc ...

After a VERY long afternoon of exhaustive testing and keyboard smashing, ive found the following:

I have 2 sticks of Kingmax 256M PC2700. If i use one stick, then everything seems to run fine. Quite stable. 3D Mark scores 9550.
Aggressive RAM settings. AGP on 4X. RAM @ 333 Default voltages.

As soon as i add the 2nd stick. I get BSOD. No matter what i change the settings to, it still fails. So i went back to 256 but used the 2nd stick only. It worked fine - so both RAM must be good.

Went back to both sticks and upp'ed DDR voltage to 2.6 and 2.7. with less aggressive settings. Got XP to boot straight away, but system was VERY unstable. Many program crashes, explorer crashes, corrupt file warnings etc. Pulled one stick out and everything fine again. This config worked fine on V1.1 board running the GF3. I tried the GF3 in this board and same symptoms exist.

Could someone please suggest a solution ?

I have a stick of RAM going to waste

Will the F9 BIOS make a difference ? Will any other voltage tweaks help ? Is the RAM poor quality ? Should i buy some top shelf Corsair stuff ? I noticed the manual saying that stability issues occur with 3 sticks of PC2700 - maybe with 2 also ?

Any advice from you gurus would really be appreciated.

Thanks for reading this far. Any info would really be appreciated.

 

[ardee]

I have the same mobo and i was flipping thru the instr. manual and i noticed on the very bottom of the page regarding RAM, it stated that it was better to use ONE 512mb RAM strip than TWO 256mb RAM strips. It said something about 'quality concerns with PC2700 RAM......', I think it is a bunch of BS, they are just covering their buts. Go and check your manual and see the RAM section. You might be advised to go out and pick up a 512mb PC2700 ram strip and let the store know that you are doing a test (so you can get your $$$ back) and see how the singe 512mb strip works out.

 

[Skiman]

thanks for the reply mate.

Still no solutions here. I have been able to get them to boot together by upping the DDR voltage to 2.6. But doing that will cause any 3d apps (like 3d mark 2001) to crash before the first test. Upping AGP and Vcore make no difference.

Ive tried the F9 BIOS, no luck there.

I find it curious that i cant run 1 stick only in DIMM 2 or 3. This sounds like a mobo fault. Can anyone else running this board run a single stick of RAM in DIMM2 or 3 without DIMM1 being occupied ?