EP-45-ud3p & F2-8500CL5D 4x1gb no POST

[tibby01]

So I have the UD3P with two 1gig sticks of the above mentioned ram running perfectly when only 2 sticks are installed. It runs great at the 1066 speed when they are installed in slots 1&3, 1&2, 2&4 with the latest bios installed.

When I try to install the other two sticks for a total of 4gb it will not post. With only 2 sticks installed, I've made the following changes to the bios:

tRFC:85
DRAM Voltage: 2.1
MCH Core: 1.4
MCH/DRAM Reference: 1.0
CAS Latency Time: 5
tRCD: 5
tRP: 5
tRAS: 15
Performance Enhance: Standard

Everything else is at optimum auto/stock settings.

It will continue to boot perfectly with these settings with only two sticks installed. I can switch which sticks are in which spots and it still works. I've also booted with just one stick to test each stick individually and windows boots. Also, these four sticks worked perfectly in my old evga 750i ftw board.

But when I try to install the other two it won't post or anything. It powers up, stays on for about a minute, then reboots and stays on indefinitely, or at least longer than five minutes. I do a hard shut down, take out two sticks, boot into the bios and it gives me the "The system has experienced boot failures because of overclocking...." warning message in mb tweeker.

Any ideas? Thanks for your help.



System specs are as follows:
xfx 8800gt
intel e8400
gigabyte ep45-ud3p
the ram listed in here
ocz agility 60gb ssd
some other add on cards

[Tradesman]

Make sure Command Rate is at 2T, then might want to raise tRFC to 88-89, if still no joy, try raising the NB by .05 to .08

Have you checked each stick individually with memtest in slot 1 to see if any of the sticks are bad?

[tibby01]

Hi Tradesman,

Thank you for the quick response. I just raised the command rate to 2, and upped the mch core to 1.46. No luck.

I did run memtest on all individually I think. It just takes longer than I'm willing to wait to double check. On the ones I did do, I only let it pass once but no errors.

Swapping out stable ram setups with other sticks was weird though. changing a stick for another would cause a previously working setup to not boot, so perhaps I should run memtest on all of them?

Figured out that I can boot up with all four sticks if they are set to ddr2-800 by changing the system memory multipler to 2.40b and loading optimized defaults for everything else in that page. I'm not really able to overclock it from there that much using my very limited knowledge of how to overclock.

Would running memtest on all of them at once and at that speed be of help or do they have to be running at 1066 for the test to mean anything?

Thanks again.

-Chris

[Tradesman]

You can go ahead and try that, might help, also if you could post your BIOS settings, would definitely help. The GSkill folks will be in today...me..I may be in around lunch, but prob not till later in PM

[tibby01]

Well, I'm able to boot with all 4 sticks now without any problems at all with the following different from stock. Everything else is at the optimized defaults.

425 host frequency
400mhz memory latch
2.00D memory multiplier

It's booting and working really fast and stable at those settings and the cpu overclock and I think I'm going to keep it there. I upgraded to this new hardware to have a nice stable system with minimal fiddling and this satisfies that perfectly.

If you think I can benefit further from making a couple small changes(will messing with timings yield results?) then let me know, but I'm really not worried about getting to 1066 anymore. Just not worth the hassle for the slight improvement I may see.

Thanks for your help.

[Tradesman]

You could play with the timings, but to be honest, to 'see' an increase you'd have to run benchmarks and the only difference you'll really 'see' will be numbers, actual performance wise it wouldn't be noticable as you your running your system

[tibby01]

That's what I thought. Thanks for your help.

[Tradesman]

No problem, Have a gud 1 !