[RoAdRaGe912]

Well, I flashed the BIOS and still no good.

I can find some shit about the Intel 1156 chipset only supporting one 1600MHz DIMM per channel. It appears that it's only for processor at or below 2.66 GHz (mine is 2.93 at stock clock), but I can't find anything for certain. I have my DRAM set at 1333, stock clock on the processor, and it still comes up with 4 GB available, 2 GB usable.

The board I have has error lights for most of the components and some memory configuration built in, but it doesn't register any problems.

Edit- pulled one stick out and the other one worked just fine. I can access two slots (both secondary dual channel slots), but the video card gets in the way of the other two. I'll pull the video card tomorrow and swap sticks to that slot, and try to run two sticks in single channel to try and figure out what the issue might be.

Looks like I'm going to have to upgrade from the stock CPU cooler as well. This one isn't cutting it for even minimal usage (although I did bump the clock up to 3.36 on the processor trying to mess with this memory).

This post has been edited by RoAdRaGe912: 26 September 2010 - 09:37 PM

[RoAdRaGe912]

Wow, 1 startup hang in Windows and it was garbage. So many corrupt files. It was pretty amazing that it would still run, but besides Windows actually starting (if you opted out of the infinite chkdsk loop) almost all functions in Windows were unusable.

I was playing with DRAM timing and manually set the timings at advertised (and where it later went to under automatic optimization) and it hung during booting up. So I've been screwing with that all afternoon. Finally had to format and do clean install.

I swapped to running one DIMM per channel and it's doing fine right now. Tomorrow I might swap them from where they were in dual channel and see if it'll work. It's kind of hard to seat them with 100% certainty with these one sided locks that ASUS has. I messed with them for a while on the inital install, so I'm pretty confident they were seated all the way, but who knows. At this point it looks like it was either improperly seated or possibly bad slot on the motherboard. I'd much rather it was my own screw up because I really don't want to take this apart and send it back.

[Sean]

Yea nothing is worse than bad parts. My last PC build i put everything on the motherboard (ram, cpu, video card) to find out that the damn case was broken. It really sucks. Hopefully you didnt have them seated all the way. On a new motherboard, its a little tougher to get the ram in all the way. Give them a good push.

[RoAdRaGe912]

Aight, it's kind of annoying to swap the RAM around on this one because the heat sink on my video card blocks the first DIMM slot for each pair. Last night I had success running one DIMM per channel. Today I pulled them both out, put the DIMM that wasn't working into the slot I knew was working. Started up the comp and it worked fine. So I installed the other DIMM into the slot I had problems with yesterday. Everything is working fine now.

It looks like this new single clip retainer isn't worth a crap. You can seat the DIMM so that it's almost locked in and it's fine, but when you lock it in, the other side kicks out too far. I messed with it for a little bit and got it properly seated and everything looks good.

Phwew.

Now it's just time for a decent CPU cooler and UPS. I'm back at stock CPU clock right now, because even bumping it up slightly caused a significant temp increase. I have the DIMMs down to 1333 as well, to be extra sure that everything is happy for the moment.

[Sean]

Yea cooling is important. I never have used a UPS before. Let me know which one you pick.

[RoAdRaGe912]

Window Experience Index

CPU- 7.5
RAM- 7.5
Graphics- 6.7
Gaming Graphics- 6.7
Primary Hard Disk- 5.9

Not that WEI means that much, but this processor is pretty damn impressive, even at stock clock. So far, it has been crushing installs and they barely even register. After I upgrade the cooler I'll run some real benchmark software on it.

[Sean]

Thats some nice numbers. Are you running sata 3gb/s in that comp or older 1.5's?

[RoAdRaGe912]

3Gb/s