I'm thinking this is bad memory?

[Corasik]

Oh by the way, memtest can be a bit glitchy on some motherboards, Memtest86+ is often slightly ahead in updates and can be worth trying if Memtest is being picky. I guess you didnt try booting into XP with the ram voltage at 2.1.

PS your timings of 5/7/7/24 should be 5/6/6/18, but thats unlikely to make a difference to the result.

 

[mcast123]

snip

Thanks for all your advice, yes I tried manual timings also. I sent it back today and hopefully will get a replacement friday.

I swear the next time I'm buying an off the shelf built PC. I just want no headaches and have been out the upgrade loop for years. If I knew the motherboard "preferred" PC6400 I would have bought that.

My gut still says it's faulty memory though.

 

[Corasik]

On the whole it shouldnt be headache even with high speed ram, you just have to remember to up the voltage (And sometimes make sure that the XMP is disabled as you discovered, thats a form of auto overclocking)

I agree that your ram is very likely a dud, but you should not hesitate to get another set of PC8500+, as long as you set the correct voltage manually it will be fine. Really going down the off the shelf route, you never get enough choice or flexibility with those systems, and unless you take the extended warrenties, when things start going bad, the big oem's have pretty poor support.