ram cpu and bios

[peted347]

Hi I have a long standing problem with a system I put together a few years back. It is very unstable and after adding new cooling for cpu and vga and a new psu. I am still running into problems , so any shoves in the right direction would be a great help. A friend suggested running memtest to eliminate ram.This is where it all gets confusing. I have a matched pair of corsair 3200pt 512 sticks. When running memtest at default speeds the system just reboots after a few seconds. Corsair told me to set the voltage to 2.75 and the timings at 3-3-3-8 everything else in bios to auto and disable legacy usb. Still constant reboots. I have seen that my MB is very picky over ram but I am confused as to why when I under clock the cpu with the divider and fbs speed the memory runs ( both sticks and individually) through memtest with no errors. Any thoughts????? I'll post my bios settings and hopefully someone can point something out.
AI overclock ....Manual
CPU ex freq......200
Dram freq.......400
AGP/pci..........66.66
CPU vcore.........1.55
DDR voltage.......2.75
AGP voltage.....1.50
Performance mode..........standard
cpuid max value.........disabled ( its x16 but locked on the 3.2 northwood so i read)
Hyper threading......enabled
spd timing.....disabled
CAS#.....3
RAS#.....3
RAS# to CAS# delay....3
Precharge delay......8
Burst length............8 (tried 4 too)
Performance acceleration.........auto
Dram idle timer.....................auto
Dram refresh rate..................auto
Graphic adapter.................AGP/PCI
Graphics apeture size.........128 (tried 64 too)
Spread Spectrum...........disabled (tried enabled)
ICH delayed transaction.....enabled (tried disabled ).

i hope this helps point anything out. thanks in advance

[peterb]

I think I'd ditch the memory and try a different make. You might try setting performance acceleration to manual but I think the problem is memory. It might be worth seeing if you have the latest BIOS (September 05 I think from the Asus website, if not, try reflashing the BIOS (having underclocked it to get it stable)

[threepe]

Lowering the FSB reduces the speed at which the memory has to work. All latency settings specify the number of clock cycles the ram has to do an operation. Therefore, when you reduce the FSB you effectively increase the latency. Reduce FSB by 20% and you effectively increase latency by 20%.

Therefore, if it runs smoothly at a lower FSB, I would suggest you try returning to the FSB you want, but relax the timings on your ram. You can increase latencies as much as you like without causing damage. If that does not give you stability then as you say your mobo may just be being picky. I'm thinking 5-5-5-10 as a starting guess.

[Golden Dragoon]

I'm thinking 5-5-5-10 as a starting guess.

With it being DDR1 3-3-3-8 should be fine, DDR1 has tighter latencys than DDR2
Though saying that, your motherboard should auto detect the corect settings from the spd (try setting spd timing to enable again), you could try relaxing the settings by a half or full clock on the following settings and see if that helps:

CAS#..... 3.5 - 4
RAS#..... 3.5 - 4
RAS# to CAS# delay.... 3.5 - 4
Precharge delay...... 8 - 10


If not and your ram still works as expected at a lower than stock frequency, then it is likely that it is a faulty pair, and dependant on the warantee you should see if you can get a replacement.