Troubleshooting DDR Mem

[darbius]

So I just picked up a pair of these bad boys (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820146970) and they work great aside from the fact that they show up in the BIOS and Memtest86 as only DDR335 running at only 167 Mhz. I don't see any settings in my BIOS to force it to recognize it correctly or anything.

The mobo is an MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum SLI if that makes any difference.

Any suggestions? Thanks.

 

[Tarrant64]

bad link.

 

[darbius]

http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16820146970

Guess it picked up that paren on the end and thought it was part of the address.

 

[Tarrant64]

Only thing I can think of is check the voltage settings. Make sure your motherboard is set to the requirements of the memory. Also double check and make sure you have the latest BIOS revision for your motherboard.

And last but not least, do you have them in the proper slots? 1-3, 2-4 or 1-2, 3-4(whatever order they will go in. Should say in the manual.

 

[darbius]

Hey dude, thanks for the heads up on the mobo thing. I had read something that said on AMD slot boards you're supposed to populate the 2 mem slots that are the same color (1-3) to get it to work correctly, but the MSI FAQ had a different answer. Apparently it's 1-2 and 3-4, but if you're using only 1 stick of RAM you populate the green first. Seems weird to me, but whatever. Here's a link to the answer. http://www.msicomputer.com/support/formviewer.asp?esoformid=2651

I was previously running my 2 1gb sticks in slots 1 and 3 which apparently maxes the speed at 335. If I slotted them 1-2 then it would max at 400.

Also, I changed my setup a little and I'm running 3 gigs right now in the following setup:
Slot 1: 1gb
Slot 2: 1gb
Slot 3: 512mb
Slot 4: 512mb

It's cool that it'll run at 3 gigs, but now I just have to figure out if it's worth the sacrifice in speed. Thanks again man.

 

[Bill Kunert]

Can't you manually set it at 400 speed in bios? My 4 sticks defaults to 333 speed but I can manually set it for 400 and it runs fine. The only downside to having all 4 slots populated is that it has to run at 2T instead of 1T.

 

[darbius]

I would love it if that were the case. Unfortunately, on the MSI site they have a FAQ about the board that says that the board will absolutely not run the memory at 400 if you have 4 sticks of double-sided memory installed. I have been through and through the BIOS but have not seen anyway to change the memory speed. It tells me what the speed is, I just can't change it. Ah well. In any case, if running at 333 on that comp is too slow I'll probably just take my old gig and sell it.