Monday, 5 May 2008
MSI not ideal for upgrade?
Recently I decided to upgrade my computer, stick in another 4 Gb of PC2-6400 mem(same as my existing 2Gb HPC Reaper series). Unfortunately at the same time I decided to migrate to Vista 64 bit, and also stick in another Samsung Spinpoint 501LJ and use the onboard intel raid controller, so when I started getting BSOD's left, right and center, I had very little clue as to what the problem was. Intially I thought it was the raid controller (I decided to have 2 volumes, System with 64k stripes and Data with 128k stripes) hence I played a lot with that and then finally settled on a single volume with 128k striping(I wish I had stuck to the original plan). Since the BSODs started usually when I was playing Lord of the Rings online, I was led to believe it was my Graphics card and its drivers for 64 bit Vista, especially when the error reported atikmdag.sys as the culprit for crashing.
This led to me rolling back, uninstalling, reinstalling, and everything else you usually try with drivers. With still no luck at system stability, I reverted back to checking my new memory, this is when I noticed that when I had my new memory also installed and therefore had all DIMM banks filled, that the memory clock would revert to 667Mhz even though all my memory banks were supposed to be running at 800Mhz, so I tried to force it to 800Mhz to bios. Windows would not even boot. I tried various overclocking(as well as underclocking) options but still no stability.
Alright, so something funny is going on with the memory, well I was relieved to have narrowed down my problem to some extent. So I downloaded and burned memtest86 and burned it to a bootable disc and started testing my memory sticks...
Right so initial tests with all DIMMS filled, in various different slot options and various different frequencies, including stock, the results were always similar, billions of errors within an hour.
So to find out what the problem is, I removed the new RAM and ran the test, no errors at all. So I took it out, removed the old RAM, put new RAM in, and ran the test again, no errors at all again(guess I cant send it back to the vendor), so I tried moving the memory to the other banks on the motherboard, and still no errors, but when I put all the memory back in, billions of errors again!!! So... MSI wont let me fill my memory banks!! I've now taken the original 2gb I had out and am running with the new 4gb at 4-4-4-15. The system seems stable in windows now, I have yet to confirm if this will stabilize my gaming, if not then I guess I still have ATI problems.
In any case, I hope MSI will come up with some bios update or similar that will fix this issue. I think I shall stick my perfectly working Reaper PC2-6400 (2Gb) up on ebay.
This led to me rolling back, uninstalling, reinstalling, and everything else you usually try with drivers. With still no luck at system stability, I reverted back to checking my new memory, this is when I noticed that when I had my new memory also installed and therefore had all DIMM banks filled, that the memory clock would revert to 667Mhz even though all my memory banks were supposed to be running at 800Mhz, so I tried to force it to 800Mhz to bios. Windows would not even boot. I tried various overclocking(as well as underclocking) options but still no stability.
Alright, so something funny is going on with the memory, well I was relieved to have narrowed down my problem to some extent. So I downloaded and burned memtest86 and burned it to a bootable disc and started testing my memory sticks...
Right so initial tests with all DIMMS filled, in various different slot options and various different frequencies, including stock, the results were always similar, billions of errors within an hour.
So to find out what the problem is, I removed the new RAM and ran the test, no errors at all. So I took it out, removed the old RAM, put new RAM in, and ran the test again, no errors at all again(guess I cant send it back to the vendor), so I tried moving the memory to the other banks on the motherboard, and still no errors, but when I put all the memory back in, billions of errors again!!! So... MSI wont let me fill my memory banks!! I've now taken the original 2gb I had out and am running with the new 4gb at 4-4-4-15. The system seems stable in windows now, I have yet to confirm if this will stabilize my gaming, if not then I guess I still have ATI problems.
In any case, I hope MSI will come up with some bios update or similar that will fix this issue. I think I shall stick my perfectly working Reaper PC2-6400 (2Gb) up on ebay.
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