Willy Nilly DDR3-1866 memory

[GunsMadeAmericaFree]

Have you ever run into some new memory that works there, but not here?

I bought a couple of new motherboards at Micro Center to build systems for myself and my parents:

Gigabyte F2A55M-HD2 rev. 3 "Ultra Durable"
MSI A78M-E45 "Military Class 4"

I tried setting up a new system first using the MSI board and an A10 processor, but it would not even post. I then tried with an A4 cpu, still no post. At that point I was convinced that the board was dead, so I swapped it out & put in the Gigabyte. Surprisingly, still no post. I had a hunch and swapped in some old Patriot 1600 MHz CL11 Ram, got a post and into the BIOS. I swapped in some Kingston Hyperx blu 1600 MHz cas9, got a post and into the BIOS.

However, every time I try to get a post and into the BIOS with the Newegg memory I purchased last month, G.SKILL 1866 RAM:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231720

In either of these boards, I get nothing - no post, system just sitting there. I figured the RAM itself was bad, but then I decided to stick that G.SKILL 1866 RAM into an older Intel Pentium G3220 based GA-H81M-H system I have set up for the kids. I got a post and into the BIOS easily, and then played around in Windows for quite a while with no issues at all.

Why in the world would the memory work fine in one system, and not even let two other systems post at all? I'm really annoyed, because I bought this memory due to the excellent reviews. Plus, I've heard that with AMD's built in graphics on their A10 processors, it is important to have higher speed (low latency) RAM, so I was looking forward to using the faster RAM on my new system.

I'd be very interested in hearing thoughts on why this RAM doesn't even seem to be recognized on two boards that specifically say they support 1866 RAM even in the original manual. The RAM is very recent - made less than a month ago, so it doesn't show up a lot of places online. In fact, I couldn't even find it listed on the manufacturer's website yet, which was a bit puzzling.

 

[VirtualLarry]

It happens. A friend of mine ordered an MSI A85X board that came with free 8GB of Crucial Ballistix Sport RAM. It wouldn't POST in the board it was bundled with, go figure. I traded him some DDR3-1333 Ripjaws, and those worked fine. I used his RAM in a 3570K build I did for a different friend.

 

[ikachu]

Do you have the latest BIOS for your motherboard? How many DIMMs are you using? Have you tried one at a time? Which slots are populating them into?

 

[Soulkeeper]

I had a similar experience with a gigabyte board not getting along with samsung memory.
It'd post, but was never stable nomatter what clocks, timings, or voltages were used.

The same memory was stable in 3 other boards, and other brands of memory were stable in that gigabyte board. The combination just didn't like each other for whatever reason.

I suspect there are some sub timings not exposed to the user that are set behind the scenes.
I suppose these kinds of problems can usually be fixed with a bios update if the mb maker notices the issue. In my case they stopped releasing bios updates, so that never happened.

 

[ikachu]

If your board has a POST code display, I can try to look up what the code means. Do you know which BIOS vendor you have?

 

[GunsMadeAmericaFree]

Do you have the latest BIOS for your motherboard? How many DIMMs are you using? Have you tried one at a time? Which slots are populating them into?

Yes, I tried using both sticks of the RAM I purchased. On one board, I tried the sticks in both of the 2 motherboard memory slots, and in the other I tried it in all 4 of them. I always start out in the one marked "dimm1". In both cases, the stick will work in my Pentium system, and not in either of the AMD systems.

I was able to boot up using the old RAM (Patriot & Kingston), and so yes, I was able to update the BIOS on each board to the latest version, but it made no difference as far as the RAM goes.

G.SKILL is going to let me do an RMA exchange for similar memory that they recommend as compatible with both boards.

When did it become important to cross reference board/memory compatibility to make sure that memory would work? In the old days, all you had to do was to double check that it wasn't ECC RAM, and perhaps that it wasn't high density RAM on some boards, which some older ones had issues with. For the most part, if you paid attention to those two things, all you had to do was make sure that the motherboard would support the speed you bought - and if it didn't, it would still run the RAM at a lower speed anyway.

When did these increasing motherboard/RAM incompatibilities start arising, and what causes it most of the time?

 

[VirtualLarry]

When did these increasing motherboard/RAM incompatibilities start arising, and what causes it most of the time?

It has always been there, you've just been lucky. I had some Centon DDR DIMMs back in the day, that didn't work in AMD64 CPU systems (Socket 939), would throw up errors in Memtest86+ every time, repeatedly. So they were bad RAM, right? Nope, worked just peachy in an Intel-chipset 865PE rig.

Hey, it happens.

 

[taltamir]

1. New RAM usually fails to post until you reset the CMOS on the mobo.
2. Watch the voltage (and timing), RAM makers are notorious about using extreme overclocks or under timings (or both) to boost mhz. such shoddy ram is very hit and miss on what mobo it works on.
3. i have run across various ram/mobo incompatibilities over the years. some combinations just don't want to work together for no justifiable reason.

 

[ikachu]

Clearing CMOS is a good idea too. It's possible that the BIOS is attempting to set the DIMM to some setting it doesn't support based on the previous DIMMs that were in the system.

Do you have Richland or Trinity APU?

Per the Table 12 in the BKDG (http://support.amd.com/TechDocs/42300_15h_Mod_10h-1Fh_BKDG.pdf)

Trinity only supports Single Rank DIMMs if you are doing 2 DIMMs per channel at 1866. RL should support Dual Rank DIMMs at that speed. I'm not sure if the DIMMs you are using are single rank or not though.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

. . .
When did it become important to cross reference board/memory compatibility to make sure that memory would work? In the old days, all you had to do was to double check that it wasn't ECC RAM, and perhaps that it wasn't high density RAM on some boards, which some older ones had issues with. . . . .
When did these increasing motherboard/RAM incompatibilities start arising, and what causes it most of the time?

It seemed from the time the original DDR and RAMBUS modules were competing, I became very sensitive about this. There were even two types of RAMBUS, and I had to be sure I had the right ones. I ran into trouble with building a family-member's system and the DDR RAM I'd chosen. After that, I ALWAYS use the Mem-Maker's "Configurator," and G.SKILL's list of tested motherboards and RAM models is extensive.

Also, with the G.SKILL model-line of RipJaws, I never had to completely reset the BIOS when moving from "RipJaws" to "RipJaws Z." [Which, by the way, have better timings that the X modules cited by the OP, but those would be good, too.]

I suppose you have to go through a set of troubleshooting steps with symptoms such as those described. It may seem like a lot of trouble.

But like the fictional version of Meyer Lansky said in the movie: "Because dat's da bidnis we're in!"