F3-12800CL9D-4GBNQ on GA-MA770T-UD3P v1.1

[ptk81177]

My System:
AMD Phenom II 955 BE 3.2ghz (not overclocked)
GA-MA770T-UD3P v 1.1 Bios is F11C
Antec TruePower 550 PSU
XFX Geforce 9500GT
F3-12800CL9D-4GBNQ (dual channel or single channel)
Windows XP Professional and Ubuntu 10.04

I am having issues getting my ram working in either 1600mhz or 1333mhz speed, ganged,unganged, dual channel, single channel etc.

I started out at 1600mhz 9-9-9-24 2T 160ns standard voltages then increased gradually, finally stopping at 1.7v DRAM and CPU-NB at 1.2v.

At any speed or voltage I do not get any errors in overnight tests of Memtest. However soon as I enter a game (tried Everquest,WoW,Runes of Magic,Lord of the Rings online) it will eventually hang and reboot.


I have RMA'd the video card and when tested by XFX they said nothing was wrong but they replaced it with a different card anyway.

I load tested the PSU with pushing the CPU cores to 100 percent while doing Burnin tests on VRAM,RAM,HDD writes/reads, watching a DVD and using USB accessories all at once. No reboots.

When I start a game it resets. I do not think its the power supply or I would think I would have seen a reboot once I had everything on the system going at once.

I have tried two different sets of RAM, different manufactures different speeds.

I have tried different graphics drivers in different operating systems (Wine in Linux) and get the same hang then reboots in both OS's.

The only thing I thought was to mess with PCI-E frequency although I am hesistant since I am not overclocking the CPU or GPU and can't find definative information on the net about what exactly it helps with or is for.


Any suggestions?

[ptk81177]

FSB frequency

After re-reading the AMD posts and Dragon tuning guide about 4 times I think I have a firmer grasp of the details.

I am currently running 4:1 ratio to get to DDR3-1600. I believe my NBclock is set to auto and most likely is not the reccommended 3 times the base memory clock.

Would this thereoritcally cause the hang/reboots but only in fullscreen framebuffer copies like in games?

[GSKILL TECH]

You got it! Set NB Frequency to 2400, and it should be stable. Raise CPU-NB or DRAM Voltage +0.1V can also alleviate the problem, but it is not the best method.

Thank you
GSKILL TECH

[ptk81177]

Still not working

I changed the freq to 240 and dropped my mult down to get back to near stock CPU timings.

I still have the reboots with standard dram and cpu-nb voltage. Increased both to 1.6 and 1.2 respectively. Same reboots.

I set everything back to normal FSB and clock and put the DRAM down to 1333 with 9 9 9 24 and still got the reboots. Upped the voltage, same thing.

I honestly hate my chip. I have been trying to get stability at stock rated speeds since February of 2010. I am in the process of trying to get the chip RMA'd to get AMD to test it in their labs. I hope thats it because I am out of ideas. I think I have a flaky IMC.

[ptk81177]

Forgot to mention

I have even tried breadboarding my system to check for grounding issues as well as downgraded my BIOS to F10 to see if that might have caused a bug.

Everyone boasts the great overclock speeds of their AMD hardware, I can't even get it to run stock. So frustrating...

[GSKILL TECH]

Did you try testing one module at a time to make sure none have errors?

Thank you
GSKILL TECH

[ptk81177]

single dram

Yes I have tried testing both sticks just 1 module at a time using memtest86+ and get no errors.

For that matter I get zero errors testing both together as well, in any configuration, single channel, dual channel, different banks on the motherboard, ganged and unganged.

The only time I see instability is with 3D apps.

[GSKILL TECH]

What were the results of the other memory kit you tested?

Thank you
GSKILL TECH

[ptk81177]

same issue with other memory

I had the same results with the other memory manufacturers 4GB kit. I bought the gskill hoping it would fare different as it is listed on Gigabytes QVL for my board but alas I am back to square one.

Today I sent the motherboard and PSU RMA's off, hoping to do the same for the CPU. I haven't heard back from AMD yet. Those are the only 3 components that I haven't swapped a replacement to test. There may not be anything wrong with 2 of the 3 componenants but at least I will have a definate answers as to whether the components are working as intented.

The only other thing that comes to mind is bad power from the power company but I have tried the computer in 3 different locations, 2 different power companies so the odds of that are slim.

[GSKILL TECH]

What a tough one. Keep us posted on the results. Hopefully replacing parts will solve the problem.

Thank you
GSKILL TECH

[ptk81177]

Status update

I ended up getting the chip, the powersupply, and the motherboard RMA'd.

The CPU and the powersupply were replaced by the respective makers. The motherboard was tested by Gigabyte and sent back as OK.

Put the machine back together and 5 minutes later, locked up and had to reboot.

I restarted my hardware testing at square one and upgraded the video card to an ATI radeon HD 5750 with an external power connector on the top.

Everything worked fine for 3 days of testing every application, every game I could find. Since I finally had a stable working system I went ahead and upgraded to Window 7 64 bit and retested and everything still works fine at least at 1333mhz. I will be tweaking the memory speed over the next few days but at least now I am stable.

There seems to be some sort of hardware incompatibility with the way my system was configured. I had all manufacturers say their hardware was fine but only when I chose a different video card was I able to fix the issue.

Thanks for all your help.

[GSKILL TECH]

Glad to hear progress. Keep us posted, hopefully everything works fine now.

Thank you
GSKILL TECH