PC will not boot with 4 gb of ram any more.

Soldato
Joined
27 Oct 2005
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Hello,

I used to have spec in sig but I got a Q9550 from my dad.
I update bios all goes fine etc pc boots once to windows and I turn it off to swap the cpu.

E6420 goes out, Q9550 goes in.
Pc doesn't boot whatever I do.
So I try it with 1 ram stick, it boots, I do all the standard things like turn on my sata controller into raid mode, raise the northbridge volts a notch to 1.45 ( gave the pci-ex 1x bug with stock volts and iirc it also wouldn't boot with 4x1 gb before if not done this) , set ram @ 2.1v and config spd timings, save reboot, it's all fine.

I turn off pc to re-add the 3 other sticks, no luck.

Tryed some more things but this is the conclusion:

Pc will not boot with 4x1gb, be it at proper speed or ram underclocked, with the Q9550.
Pc will boot with 3x1 gb, underclocked and at proper speed with the q9550.
Pc will boot with the E6420 and 4x1gb.

I really want that 1 extra gb, alt tabbing out of gta iv is dead slow with just 3gb and shutting down memory intensive games takes ages ( till the desktop is usable again...
Any ideas to get 4gb of ram working again? Is it safe to raise the nb volts another notch, to the 2nd to highest value ? Can the stock cooling handle this? Won't I burn my board ? Would more ram volts help, on my previous board, p5ld2, i used to run my ram @ 2.3 volts, on this board it never booted with 2.3 volts though but it used to work fine on 2.1 before I got the q9550.
 
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What RAM are you using?

You realise the Q9450 has a higher fsb right?

Have you tried running E6420 with the same FSB as the Q9450?

As per sig, Geil ULL Pc6400 C4, atm running it on 667 mhz else it has to run @ 833 and I don't want to overclock anything just yet before I get stuff working like it sohuld...

The E6420 was a poor clocker, it never went above 2800mhz so never reached the FSB of the q9550, I did have an E6400 borrowed from my dad before that and that ran @ 3.2 ghz iirc which should be similar fsb to the q9550....

I know the fsb is higher but my board fully support the fsb and cpu according to the asus site....
 
cpuz.jpg



Pic of stuff...
 
It's worth a try putting the latest beta bios on

IT is the latest beta.


Anyways I've played around with it more and it brought up more wtf moments:

Borrowed my dads Q6600.
Tryed booting: Nothing :(.
Plugged out power an retry, success, I try to restore my bios stuff and I save and reboot, and beep beep beep beep beep beep, my board goes mad at me for something.
I try to get it working but I only get there in the end by starting with 1 ram stick and after that I save my settings.
I turn off the mains and retry adding one gb: No luck.
So I go back to 1 stick.
This time, I add another stick without plugging my pc out of the mains.
It boots.
Add another stick without plugging it out of the mains/turning off the psu.
Done this all the way up to dimm 4 and it now boots as if nothing ever happened with 4 gb :confused:.

I'll keep the q6600 for awhile, I can't be bothered with just 3 gb of ram, prefer losing 400 mhz clock than 1 gb of ram, will retry with the q9550 when I can be bothered I guess.
 
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Drop the CAS latency by one notch

Up the NB Voltage slightly.

Not the issue, read above post, my board doesn't accept extra ram when doing it unplugged from the mains or something like that.

I got it working fine now with 4 gb of ram @ 800mhz and 4-4-4-12.
 
My housemate was running a P965 chipset board with a Q6600 and he had nothing but trouble

I'm pretty sure he had to run it with 2 sticks of RAM instead of 4
 
Hi Hefner, I have a P965 board too and I am having a lot of problems ever since I upgraded to 4gb RAM. Can you explain what kind of problems he was having so I can rule out a problem with my other hardware (as I have been unable to find any problems).

Thanks
 
Hi Hefner, I have a P965 board too and I am having a lot of problems ever since I upgraded to 4gb RAM. Can you explain what kind of problems he was having so I can rule out a problem with my other hardware (as I have been unable to find any problems).

Thanks

What board have you got? :)
 
Yeah, my bios in the most recent version

Audigy 2 ZS - latest drivers
8800GTS - latest official drivers off the website
INTEL QUAD CORE Q6600 G0
OCZ 4GB (4X1GB) PC2-6400 GOLD (OCZ2G800R22GK )
Windows XP Pro SP3 (I was on Vista but lost my patience with the random crashes)
 
The P965 chipset doesn't work with 4 sticks of PC-6400 RAM, only PC-5300.

Have you tried slackening the timings a little? What about upping the NB volts?

If the timings are on auto, that probably won't help, I'd set it to 5-5-5-24

Using 4 sticks of ram puts twice as much strain on the NB, so that's probably why it's not working.

Ultimatley the P965 was produced before any quads were released, so issues like this are to be expected I'm afraid.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showpost.php?p=2524320&postcount=4418

I have had a P5B deluxe with 3 different 4 sticks of memory configurations. every setup required tRCD and tRP at 5 or greater. That is the only change I need to make from the 2 to 4 memory stick configuration. Increased memory volts were needed for overclocking either 2 sticks or 4. It was the save volts requirement in either setup.

With 4 sticks you can try the TRFC at 35. But, for 4 sticks I have needed that set to 42.

I keep the others set at defaults. They are 10 and 11. I think that these setting are used by OEM when optimizing of the bios.
 
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