1st Post so go easy on me

Steveo1982 · 9 Mar 2009 at 08:43

Hi all,

Long time reader on the forums but never posted until now.

On friday I had an asus P6t Deluxe v2 motherboard, Intel I7 core 920 and a corsair dominator 6gig triple channel kit delivered.

Installed all this into my antec 900 2 case along with my 850w thermaltake toughpower psu and xfx 9800 gtx+ xxx edition gfx card.

All was going well until I changed the memory profile from AUTO to XMP and it caused a blue screen error on boot up. Unrecoverable hardware error.

Cpu is running at 30 degrees idle and was at 40 when it crashed. Graphics card is known working as it was in an older pc. As soon as I set the ram back to AUTO it runs rock solid even to the point where I left it on overnight without a single crash in VISTA 64bit.

I updated the bios to the latest version but it has made no difference. The only thing I noticed was when I enabled the XMP it comes up with a warning in the bios about the dram voltage. The memory is happy with 1.65 volts but as soon as you put it on to XMP profile it jumps to 1.66v and can damage the cpu?!

Any suggestions on what could be causing the issue would be greatly appreciated as I really dont fancy RMA`ing the board or the memory.

Thanks any help given.
SteveO

SlyReaper · 9 Mar 2009 at 09:02

It sounds like the old doctor joke of "It hurts when I do this", "Don't do it then". Unless there's a reason you want your memory running in XMP mode, then keep it on auto.

The thing is, triple channel DDR3 kits are quite fragile with regards to voltage. This is because the memory controller is inside the CPU (unless I'm very much mistaken), and you can only push a limited voltage through the CPU before you damage it. Sorry I can't be more specific, but I'm not as familiar with i7 setups as I am with C2D setups.

Steveo1982 · 9 Mar 2009 at 09:54

Thanks for your help SLY.

I have just fired off a lengthy email to the technical support dept of the company I bought all the parts from to see if they have a solution.

In the mean time I will continue to run the memory on the AUTO setting. To be honest the timings on AUTO are similar to XMP. Think im just being greedy and want as much performance from the system as possible.

Annoying feature of the mother board is that the ram voltage can only be raised by .02 at a time so instead of being able to go to 1.65v you can only do 1.64v or 1.66v. Anyone know if it would be safe to put through the 1.66v without doing damage ?

SlyReaper · 9 Mar 2009 at 10:02

Honestly, you really shouldn't worry about getting high performance out of your memory. Overclocking it will make almost zero difference in anything but benchmarks.Concentrate on getting the best performance out of your CPU and graphics card first.