DS4 faulty motherboard or Ram?

bris · 1 Apr 2007 at 20:41

I just recently bought a DS4 from the clearance section and it was OEM rev 1 ,F8 (latest) bios. I put my C2D E6400 in it along with 4 sticks of corsair XMS2 pc 5400C4 ram and it failed to boot. Got caught in the cycle of fans stopping and starting. After a bit testing I decided to try one stick of ram at a time. 1 stick worked it booted first time. One of my sticks must be faulty or so I thought. Heres what I have now done.
All 4 sticks (1 at a time) of ram boot the computer normaly in all 4 slots.
Any 2 sticks of ram boot the computer in the yellow or red slots.
The problem is when ever I try to put the third or fourth sticks in the computer fails. It seems that when ever I mix slots it fails.
The board came with the latest bios F8 already loaded so I was thinking this board has already been returned as faulty. I figured a new rev 1 board would not have the latest bios, the manual was well read as well as the spine was broken. Also the 4 sticks worked well in the last board a fatality AA8xe no problem. can any one shed some light on this or maybe I have missed something in the bios? Any help or advice here would be good thanks for looking.

megatron · 1 Apr 2007 at 21:25

U say the Ram worked in a previous board, then Id assume its good. I wouldnt be suprised if motherboards had problems with 4Gb ram, not exactly standard loadout at the moment. You can increase stability when using 4dimms by slackening the timings. There was a good post on xtremesystems.org about it.

bris · 1 Apr 2007 at 21:29

Oh sorry I forgot to mention it is 2gig not 4gig, 512mb sticks sorry. With 3 or 4 sticks in I cant even get int the bios.

WJA96 · 2 Apr 2007 at 08:36

I'd RMA it, as it should be fine. Corsair is the benchmark (no pun intended) for compatability so if it won't run with Corsair, it probably won't run with anything. All the RAM slots should work, so if they don't, send it back.

As I understand it, Clearance is new product, with all warranties etc. intact, so you shouldn't have any problems returning it.

Just for my own interest, what 'bundle' came with the OEM board? I was looking at those, but I was a bit concerned that I might not get an I/O shield.

bris · 2 Apr 2007 at 10:44

I didnt get the i o shield, just the board in a white box with the manual, but emailed them straight away and they sent me one out. Makes no difference now though as its a faulty board and going back. It has been returned before maybe not to overclockers but someone has owned this board, found the fault updated the bios to try and fix it and returned it. it has then been tested with 1 stick of ram found to be working so thought to be good and resold as OEM. Just hope the return procedure dosent take to long.

ca9phoenix · 2 Apr 2007 at 10:51

i had problems with corsair c5 in my ds4, just wouldn't run it. only 2 specific sticks of my 4 would work, changed to geil and i have all 4 running no problems at all. the board is more stable now too.

i'd say it was definately a compatibility issue.

(i'm also on f8 bios)