Memory Diagnosis

[drwoo123]

I have a strange problem. I have an aging Gigabyte 8IEXP motherboard that for the longest time has had 768MB of RAM. I found an old system that I wasn't really using too heavily and decided to decommision and harvest for parts. I took a 256MB chip out of there and put it in the my gigabyte board. For some strange reason - the system wont detect the memory. If I remove one of the memory chips it works fine. And if I keep it in there alone it works fine.

3 Slots

256MB - Slot 1
256MB - Slot 2
512MB - Slot 3

I ran a memory checker and the memory is fine - I've been using it on another machine for ages.

The only difference is that the two of the three chips are from the crucial - and this last one I put in is some no name brand - but like I said - it works alone.

Any ideas?

 

[MichaelD]

Well, that's a fairly modern board with the Intel 845E chipset. The chipset supports 2GB of ram, max (SEE HERE) so you're not exceeding max memory.

But, is that third stick of ram the same speed as the others? Are they ALL PC1600/2100 or are you mixing them?

Do you have memory options in the bios all set to "AUTO?" They should be when you're mixing sticks of memory that aren't exactly identical.

Finally, have you reset the CMOS? Sometimes, the bios will get confused when you add in a strange piece of hardware and clearing it out will refresh things.

 

[drwoo123]

Is there any easy way to reset the CMOS? I tried "Loading Fail Safe Defaults" and that didn't work. I know the memory is there. CPU Z picks it up as 1024MB installed. Just the bios, and subsequently windows doesn't.