I have hit a wall. I have just built a system with the specs below and for some reason I can not get 4GB of memory to work no matter how hard I detune the Patriot RAM. I am new to Anandtech and I have tried everything and these are the steps I have taken. Everyone here is my last hope.
System:
ASUS A8N-SLI Premium (BIOS 1007.002 BETA)
AMD X2 4400 OCed (to 2.6+ stable but went down to match 1:1 for 2GB)
4 GB Patriot RAM (4 x 1 GB 3200 LL - PDC2G3200LLK) Good stuff for the price OCed at 228 2-3-2-5-t1 for $229 for 2 GB (can get up to 250 with loose timings)
Water-cooled with dual radiators
MSI 7800GTX
LSI Megaraid Express 500 (with 128 MB Cache)
2 IBM 15,000 RPM 36 GB SCSI3 (U160) drives in raid 1 64K
XP 64 ->OS
Other BS that is irrelevant
The second I put in the extra 2GB of Ram (at substantially slower speeds - 2.2 GHZ CPU - 900 HTT - 3-3-3-8-t2 150 MHz fsb or lower) windows quickly becomes corrupted. I tried to reinstall and at the screen where XP64 installer tries to format the drives it gives me the damaged drives error. I went through the usually steps of running every possible HD error checking with no problems (there was corruption but I fixed it). Thus, took the hard drives out of the mix. I then ran memtest (test 5 and 6 for several hours) seemed slow but passed. Memory is good. Thus, leading me to the SCSI Card on the PCI bus as a possible problem. The PCI bus is locked at 33 and I can do any option you can imagine in the SCSI card Bios (format, create, arrays, and etc). I could even install old DOS with no problem and heavily over-clocked. I went for another install of XP64. Once again when XP64 installer went to format the drives it gives the BS that the SCSI drives are damaged. Same results when I tried to install XP32 got a little farther but still lead to curroption. I then tried changing the ?4 GB remapping? options in the bios. I tried all conceivable different options (s/w remapping - enabled and h/w remapping disabled, vice versa and both enabled) with the same results. When I disabled both s/w and h/w remapping in the bios, of course I could install windows but I only saw 2.7 gigs of memory. Also what is the differnece between S/W and H/W remapping? I assume hardware and software but I could not find any information on this. There is something going on with the PCI bus with 4 GB installed on the ASUS A8N-SLI board which I can not figure out how to solve so the PCI cards on it will work probably (i.e. SCSI). ANY HELP WOULD BE GREATLY APPRECIATED because I am at a wall on this one. Been up till 4AM last three nights. Any of you 4GB people (which are a few) have you run into this problem and how did you fix it.
Greatly appreciative,
Andrew
System:
ASUS A8N-SLI Premium (BIOS 1007.002 BETA)
AMD X2 4400 OCed (to 2.6+ stable but went down to match 1:1 for 2GB)
4 GB Patriot RAM (4 x 1 GB 3200 LL - PDC2G3200LLK) Good stuff for the price OCed at 228 2-3-2-5-t1 for $229 for 2 GB (can get up to 250 with loose timings)
Water-cooled with dual radiators
MSI 7800GTX
LSI Megaraid Express 500 (with 128 MB Cache)
2 IBM 15,000 RPM 36 GB SCSI3 (U160) drives in raid 1 64K
XP 64 ->OS
Other BS that is irrelevant
The second I put in the extra 2GB of Ram (at substantially slower speeds - 2.2 GHZ CPU - 900 HTT - 3-3-3-8-t2 150 MHz fsb or lower) windows quickly becomes corrupted. I tried to reinstall and at the screen where XP64 installer tries to format the drives it gives me the damaged drives error. I went through the usually steps of running every possible HD error checking with no problems (there was corruption but I fixed it). Thus, took the hard drives out of the mix. I then ran memtest (test 5 and 6 for several hours) seemed slow but passed. Memory is good. Thus, leading me to the SCSI Card on the PCI bus as a possible problem. The PCI bus is locked at 33 and I can do any option you can imagine in the SCSI card Bios (format, create, arrays, and etc). I could even install old DOS with no problem and heavily over-clocked. I went for another install of XP64. Once again when XP64 installer went to format the drives it gives the BS that the SCSI drives are damaged. Same results when I tried to install XP32 got a little farther but still lead to curroption. I then tried changing the ?4 GB remapping? options in the bios. I tried all conceivable different options (s/w remapping - enabled and h/w remapping disabled, vice versa and both enabled) with the same results. When I disabled both s/w and h/w remapping in the bios, of course I could install windows but I only saw 2.7 gigs of memory. Also what is the differnece between S/W and H/W remapping? I assume hardware and software but I could not find any information on this. There is something going on with the PCI bus with 4 GB installed on the ASUS A8N-SLI board which I can not figure out how to solve so the PCI cards on it will work probably (i.e. SCSI). ANY HELP WOULD BE GREATLY APPRECIATED because I am at a wall on this one. Been up till 4AM last three nights. Any of you 4GB people (which are a few) have you run into this problem and how did you fix it.
Greatly appreciative,
Andrew
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