Santa brought me 1Gb TwinMOS duakl channel kit...

[old.user4556]

Received a new pack of 1 Gb (2x512 dual chan) TwinMOS ram today from overclockers (they confirmed the old pack to be faulty).

Fitted it, powered up the PC, booting into XP - blue screen + memory dump.

"oh ffs..."

Rebooted, same again. Went into the BIOS and made sure that everything was at default ("by spd" mem timings), not overclocked and nothing unusual. Still memory problems. Desperate for the memory to work, I changed the memory speed to 5/3 of the FSB/MEM speed ratio. When I booted up, this worked a peach (even if the mem speed was only 120 MHz) so I tried the maximum 6/5 ratio (166 MHz I think..) which gave a mem speed of 333 MHz - this too worked no problem. Back into the bios, tried 6/6 (200 MHz or 400 DDR) - blue screens in XP .

Could it be the CPU, or the motherboard, or the Ram? ABit show TwinMOS PC3200 to be fine with the Abit AN7, so there is no obvious compatibility problems. On searching the net, there are no immediate problems or issues documented with the AN7, but there seems to be a lot of dual channels issues and/or memory problems on the net.

Thanks to Xavier for the initial help and diagnostics.

Bah, any ideas?

Mobo: ABit AN7 (nforce2) - latest BIOS.
Memory: TwinMOS 1 GB (2x512) PC3200 DDR400 CL2.5
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 3200+

G

 

[Xavier]

When you set it to 'by spd' what CAS latencies does the board try to run it at?

I'd try DDR400 at CAS3 with the slackest timings the board will stoop to, just to see if you can get anywhere near the 400Mhz mark.

Xav

 

[Danya]

Handy util for checking your memory speed btw: http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php
Quite handy as you can see:

I really need to get some pc3200 for my barton :l

 

[old.user4556]

When you set it to 'by spd' what CAS latencies does the board try to run it at?

I'd try DDR400 at CAS3 with the slackest timings the board will stoop to, just to see if you can get anywhere near the 400Mhz mark.

Xav

At first I tried CAS3, so the timings were 3,3,3,5. XP booted fine, and I thought "yay! cracked it". I ran the mem test on Sandra, and that too worked. As soon as I ran a game, or 3Dmark2003 it blue screened or reported problems loading. I ran sandra again, and it died on the mem test. The most stable I can get at 400 MHz is by running a memory voltage of 2.9v and memory timings of 3,7,7,11 - not ideal by a long shot. XP loads and basic internet/email/msn works, but i've yet to try any games like this.

Whilst googling at work, I found a load of articles on 3200+ barton's unable to run at 200 MHz mem bus but ok at 166 (like me). The Abit AN7 has been blamed for this, but then someone returned the AN7 for an NF7-S with the same problem. Additionally, the finger wagged at TwinMOS PC3200 ram being generally shit, but like before; someone replaced it for Corsair ram and had the same problem.

So wtf is going on?

Corsair bloke http://hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/19702/

http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/16500/

There are also a lot of mentions of the same problem on nforcershq.com, some people have managed to fix the problem with really high timings.

Perhaps I should return the ram and pay for higher quality OCZ. Then again, I'm unsure if it's the Abit AN7, or the ram. Just not sure.

Working at 400 MHz at the mo, but not yet tried any games.

G

 

[old.user4556]

https://forums.freddyshouse.com/showthread.php?p=36446#post36446