New RAM causes system to BSOD.

[majmera]

I have a nforce board with Athlon XP. My system currently has only 1 256MB DDR2100 module. Yesterday I bought corsair 512MB x 2 DDR 3200 RAM. I know my mobo does not support DDR 3200, but I thought that it'll still work fine albeit at 2100 and will be good to have if I upgrade my mobo and CPU.
Now installing the new RAM module, causes my system to BSOD after coming up in Win XP (getting past the logon etc).
I have tried using one new module at a time by itself (for both of them) and even that does not work. Putting back my old RAM just works fine.
Any ideas?

 

[Baldeagle76]

what kind of motherboard? and have you already tried adjusting bios settings?

 

[majmera]

My motherboard is a MSI nforce (6373) board. What do I need to adjust in the bios? The clock frequency is set to max at 266.

 

[jackschmittusa]

With the old stick in, make sure the ram timings in the bios is set to auto (or "by SPD"), write down all of the settings that "auto" comes up with. Change it to manual and enter all of those same settings. Then try the new ram.

 

[majmera]

Interestingly I popped in my spare HDD and with the new RAM modules, reinstalled XP and that seems to work fine.
I looked at the dump produced by one of the earlier BSODs and seems like it was something to do with the display. My mobo has onboard video.

Not sure what happened, but if this installation stays stable, I'll reinstall on my regular HDD and see what happens.

Thanks for your interest guys!!!

 

[Baldeagle76]

hehe , not sure did anything but glad to hear another computer is working :thumbsup:

 

[majmera]

Hmm, I think I spoke too soon. I am still seeing crashes here and there, but it stays up longer than the previous hard drive. Last night, I ran memtest on the new modules and it saw failures. I can't believe that both the modules can be bad. This has to be my Mobo. Tonight will try running memtest on one module at a time and see if that works.