Gigabyte P35 DQ6 RAM Compatability Issues

Kobrakai · 23 Sep 2007 at 15:52

How are the current Gigabyte P35 DQ3/DQ4/DQ6 boards with RAM these days? I’m thinking of putting 4GB of Corsair 1066Mhz in a DQ6 but I noticed several threads and the sticky at the top complain about problems booting with certain types of RAM (especially using 4GB), and having to adjust voltages etc manually in the BIOS.

Is this only a problem with the old chipset? Or is it still a problem with the P35’s?

Cob · 23 Sep 2007 at 16:05

The memory compatibility issues in the first page of the sticky deal with the P965 versions of the Gigabytes, and even then they are very much out of date. Gigabyte did a lot of work with their BIOS's to get the majority of the memory issues sorted out.

The P35's in general have very good memory compatibility.

As for adjusting voltages and timings, most PC6400, and virtually all PC8500 will have to be set manually anyway, no matter which board is used.

ByteJuggler · 23 Sep 2007 at 16:54

In my experience they are very good, however the motherboard defaults to 1.8V (IIRC) for the RAM (don't know if this is always the case or not), and some sticks don't run stably at that voltage as they're then undervolted and actually requires the JDEC spec voltage which is 2.1V to run stably (which isn't really a surprise.) In such cases it's a simple matter of upping the voltage in the BIOS to the JDEC spec after which all is well. It's just something to bear in mind when building, the fact that you might have to make this adjustment does not imply that there's anything wrong with either the motherboard or the RAM.

Kobrakai · 23 Sep 2007 at 17:09

Thanks for the replies.

Are the correct settings to use explained in the manual?

ByteJuggler · 24 Sep 2007 at 02:36

Not particularly, unfortunately, probably because generally the BIOS picks the right voltage and because the actual requirement depends on the modules being used (and the motherboard manual obviously can't spec for all the possible memory modules that might be used with the mobo.)

However I expect for the vast majority of cases the motherboard will in fact use the correct voltage and/or the issue will be moot. In the 3 systems using P35 Gigabyte boards I can specifically speak of that I directly had a hand in recently, only one needed to be manually tweaked, the other 2 ran stably with BIOS selected settings. I did not however perform a BIOS update on that system, so it's possible that a BIOS update would also have solved the problem. If I have a chance I might try to get the owner to do a BIOS update sometime and see what happens with the RAM voltage. In any case, one of the other 3 boxes had Corsair RAM in (800Mhz though), and ran fine on defaults as I recall. (The box that needed tweaking did not use Corsair, I can't remember what it used, possibly Ballistix.)

In short: Don't worry about it, it's unlikely to be a big problem. Just make sure you test for stability after you've built etc.