weird, its not asking me anything :S
D.J. asked: I have two 2GB sets of Corsair XMS2 RAM. One set is rated for PC2-6400 and the other for PC2-8500. I don’t have the money to buy another 2GB PC2-8500 kit, so I just installed them both in my machine for now. I know that the speed will be limited to 800MHz, which is the speed of the slowest kit, but for now that’s what I have to do to have 4GB of RAM. My problem is that when Windows Vista boots up it almost always freezes. The one time I did get Windows to boot properly it only recognized 2GB and not the whole 4GB. I rebooted and checked the bios and it said all 4GB was available, but when I tried to get back into Windows the system froze again. Is there something in Vista that won’t let me upgrade RAM? Most of the time it gives me a blue screen with a physical memory dump message and shows a bunch of numbers. I am running Vista Ultimate with an Intel QX6700, a pair of Raptor 150GB drives in RAID 0, two EVGA 8800 GTX cards, and an Asus Striker Extreme motherboard.
Asus’ nForce 680i SLI based Striker Extreme motherboard can be finicky when all four DIMM slots are loaded with unmatched memory kits.
A: There are a number of things that could be happening on your machine causing these errors, including an improperly configured BIOS, incorrectly installed memory, or even bad DIMMs. The first thing I suggest you do is ensure your memory is installed in matched pairs. Install both of your PC2-6400 sticks in to the blue slots on the Striker motherboard and both PC2-8500 sticks into the white slots. If you mate a PC2-6400 DIMM with a PC2-8500 DIMM in dual-channel mode that could cause a problem. I also suggest updating your system BIOS. BIOS revisions 901 and newer for the Striker Extreme incorporate compatibility fixes for some different RAM types. You may want to perform the BIOS update with only two matched DIMMs installed as a preventative measure, however. You don’t want the system hard-locking during a BIOS update. Once the BIOS update is done and you’re sure the memory is installed correctly, enter the BIOS and manually set the timings and voltage; don’t leave the memory configuration menus set to ‘Auto’. Set the timings to match the slower of the two kits (likely 5-5-5-18-2T) and set the voltage to match the higher of the two kits. If there is a big disparity in voltage between the two, for example let’s say one kit only requires 1.8v and the other 2.4v, try a voltage somewhere in between. The PC2-800 kit should be able to tolerate a somewhat higher voltage, and because the PC2-8500 kit is running at “only” 800MHz, a somewhat lower voltage should work for it as well.
I’d also suggest running Memtest86 to check for errors. It’s possible one (or more) of the four sticks of RAM in your system are defective. Run memtest with only two sticks installed at a time to see if they pass the diagnostic. If memtest reports that all is well, and you’re confident the system is configured properly and you’re still having problems, you may need to relax the timings even further to stabilize the system. Good luck.
