msi mobo staying in 333mhz not 400!

[bmx045]

ok well I have the msi rs482m4-ild socket 939 ati xpress 200 mainboard, kingston 512mb ddr400 and kingmax 512mb ddr400 memory, athlon 64 venice 2ghz, radeon x1800xt 256mb ddr3 pci express x16. Well the problem is it will not get out of 333mhz mode, the system is running at 2ghz (200x10) but the memory speed is still 333 instead of 400.

This mainboard has 4 DIMM slots, slots 1 and 3 are green, 2 and 4 are purple. I have my sticks on 1 and 2 right now, stable w/o a problem, though its at 333. I manually selected memory speed as 200 in the bios and it still says 333. I searched through google about this issue and noticed replies along the lines of updating the bios, well, my bios software is 11/25/05, the latest msi's site even has for download. I tried switching the memory to slots 1 and 3 and its still 333. Everything runs fine, no problems this way, though unsure as to why it won't let it switch to 400, is there another bios setting that will concurrently effect this speed change? I'm not using onboard graphics, its disabled, full 1gb of ram is being utilized. Though when I remove 1 of the sticks, it goes to 400 like it should, just not 400 with both in there.

any thoughts?

 

[Fardringle]

Originally posted by: bmx045
Though when I remove 1 of the sticks, it goes to 400 like it should, just not 400 with both in there.

any thoughts?

Using a matched pair of PC3200 (DDR400) sticks will probably fix the problem for you. I have an MSI board (different model) that will not run the memory at 200/400MHz if I put two different sticks of RAM in it. It works normally with one stick of any PC3200+ RAM or with two identical sticks but stays at 333MHz with two sticks that aren't exactly the same, even if they are from the same manufacturer.

 

[dinub1]

I have encountered this problem with another MSI board, but for S754. But this happnend only when I tried to connect 3 chips of RAM in all 3 RAM Slots. FYI Socket 754 board are only single channel memry mode and they have only 3 slots. With 2 chips in slot 1 +2 works fine but with the third it goes down to DDR333. From what I read there is a problem with the memory controller of the AMD 64 CPU but this should have been corrected for socket 939.
I do not think that the problem is correctable. But you can run with same memories reading DDR333. There will be no harm to the system though it may run slightly slower.

If board is in warranty email MSI technical support. They either need to solve the prlobem or RMA the moterhboard or uour money back. In my case I simply decided that I run with 2 chips (I GB) instead of 3 (1.5 GB)> The difference is anyway not visible.

 

[dinub1]

As I wrote earlier, with mine (S754) I had 3 matched memory chips. With two in slot 1+2 it worked fine and reported DDR400, but after inserting the identical 3rd, it repported DDr333 only. And this is related apparently to some limitation on the memry controller which is built into the AMD 64 CPU.