4 Sticks Boots fine, BSOD in Win 7

[hobbes7869]

I am running 4 sticks (8 gigs) of F3-10666CL9D-4GBNQ in my Gigabyte GA-H55-USB3 motherboard, core i5 750, gtx 460 768mb video card. OS Is Win 7 x64 Professional. The problem arose once I added 4 gb (2 sticks) of this ram to the original 2 sticks (the lables on the sticks have a sept 2010 date on the originals purchased, and Dec 2010 date on the newest sticks). With 2 sticks, from either the new batch or the first batch, everything is rock solid. With the 4 sticks inserted, I get the BSOD, or just a crash when logging into windows. Everything boots up just fine, all the ram is recognized. I am running the F7 bios, which is the most recent. What is interesting is that once I do get logged into windows, it is rock solid, i can play games for hours with out it BSODing. Sleep does not work however, if i let it sleep for more than a few minutes. If i put the computer to sleep and wake it back up with in 2 minutes, it is okay. Any longer than that, and it will BSOD or simply restart, and than the BSODs and the restarts begin to happen again.

Another thing to add is that this same computer hardware is also running OSX 10.6.5 as a hackintosh, which is on a second drive and I can boot into that every time with all 8GB being recognized and that is rock solid as well, no issues or crashes. So it seems that the combination of Ram and MB does play into the stability of the system, but only with Windows 7. I have tried several fresh installs of Win7 as well, to eliminate a bad install. I am perplexed. I have tried to change the voltages, down closed to 1066 rather than 1333 and many other things, and have not ever come up with a reasonable explanation or solution. Thanks!

[Tradesman]

Could you post your voltages (and if set at auto, make a brief change to then just to find what the 'auto' setting is...may be as simple as a bit of voltage to the vCore

[hobbes7869]

RE:4 Sticks Boots fine, BSOD in Win 7

Thanks for responding. I have added pictures of all my bios settings. I did notice that my tRFC is set to auto and is running at 60, rather than 80, as has been suggested in other posts. What is strange is that if I do a proper shutdown or restart after windows 7 has been running, It starts up and works great. It is just if I use sleep, then it seems to mess with something and i struggle to get back into windows, but this only occurs with 4 slots occupied. Below are all of my settings. Thanks for looking.

Settings. System Mem Multiplier ( 80)
mem frequency 1066 mhz (I down clocked, seemed to work better)
Performance Enhance = Turbo
Timing Settings are set to auto and are currently (appears that the turbo is increasing timimgs)
tCL 8
tRCD 8
tRP 8
tRAS 20
tRRD 4
tWTP 19
tRFC 60 (should this be 80?)
tCMD 2


BCLK 133.37 MHZ
QPI 4801.50 MHZ
Uncore 2134 MHZ
Mem Freq 1067 MHZ

vCore= 1.184v (default is 1.19375)
DRAM Voltage= 1.632v
qpi/vtt=1.1v
PCH Core=1.05v
CPU PLL=1.80v

Also, there is DRAM Termination (I left at auto, i am unsure of what this is other than it affects the impedence in the modules?)
Channel A and B Data Vref and addres Vref are also at auto. Not sure if those play any part into stability, The default is .75v.

[Tradesman]

The downclocking to 1066 tightened the timings so @ 1066 w/ CL8 you are probably close to 1333/CL9 performance (the lower the timings the better the performance) - for 1333 would suggest speed 1333, the BLCK where it is 133 at x 10, raise QPI/VTT to 1.2, PCH Core 1.1, timings 9-9-9-24, CR at 2, DRAM voltage 1.5 to 1.55 and vCore to 1.95 then if stable can try lowering voltages a little bit at a time, though all should be safe

[hobbes7869]

Thanks for the suggestions, I did try to increase the voltages as suggested. Seems to have helped a bit, as when i do have a BSOD I am usually able to hit reset and after a couple of times get back in, before I would have to try up to ten times. Also, I found that if i unplug my machine for 2 minutes, I will get right back into windows. I have also narrowed the cause of the BSOD down to trying to sleep the computer in in S3 state. in S1 state as set in the bios, my computer wont even sleep at all. All very strange, as Like I said below, the system is rock solid as long as I dont try to sleep the machine. I am leaning towards it might just be a function of the motherboard and windows not playing well when i have all four slots populated with ram. I am still going to tweak it to see if I can get stable sleep. Thanks for the help

[Tradesman]

No problem, may want to check w/ GB and see if it may be BIOS issue they are working on

[hobbes7869]

Well, I reinstalled win 7 x64 today, was getting errors when trying to update. Not certain yet, but I have been able to sleep the computer now for 30 minutes, and wake it up with out the BSOD. Tenatively, I am going to say that it might have been a bad install of win 7 that was leading to the instability in the system. I am going to keep checking over time and report back.