Problem With Ram & Mobo

Rye

I have a motherboard and I purchased this Ram for it. My rig has been running awesome.

I recently ordered a second kit of that ram to max out my motherboard at 16gb (I do lots of multitasking, rendering, working in 5 adobe programs at a time etc.) I installed it after verifying it was the exact same kit, but my computer failed to boot. I believe it failed at the mem check. I removed the Ram, apparently after corrupting my BIOS and having to recover using my windows cd.

Now, How do I go about troubleshooting this problem? I know the memory isn't listed under the "supported memory" for the board, but it's GSkill and the other kit worked fine. I don't have a voltmeter or a spare rig around to test the Ram again, and I don't wanna risk anything else bad happening on my now-good rig. How can I ensure that A) the board isn't at fault and the Memory isn't bricked?

I'm relatively new to computer building, so I barely know how to assemble a computer with functioning parts, let alone diagnose a mechanically faulty piece of hardware.

Thanks in advance, H&A.

UPDATE -

So, I swapped in my other RAM and it was functional. However, I still can't get 4 dimms to work at the same time. I tried some other things like flipping the "OV DRAM" switch (adding voltage) and that got it to boot once. I checked the installed RAM in windows, and it was giving me "16gb (8 Usable)", si I doubt it was actually working correctly. But then it stopped booting with 4 sticks again.

The RAM was lower voltage, I thought (1.5v) so I don't know what the problem is. I thought I could manually set some voltage numbers in the BIOS, but I can't get it to boot with 4 anymore. Any more advice?

Essee

Well, since it shouldn't be possible to put the RAM in the wrong slots (since you're filling out all of them)... I would recommend that you try each stick of new RAM in the board individually. Take out the other RAM, use just one of the new chips, and see if the machine still boots. If it won't boot, assuming it's properly-seated, you've found a problem stick. Even if there's something wrong with the RAM, I'm pretty sure (correct me if I'm wrong) there shouldn't be any ADDITIONAL danger to your computer from testing the RAM that way. I'm not exactly sure why it reset your BIOS (maybe I just haven't seen that personally), but that doesn't seem too odd... You said you had to recover using your Windows CD, did it really not let you back into Windows after a little thing like that? I'm used to Windows just whining about wanting you to do startup recovery (which never really does much in my experience) and that's it. Maybe it got confused and thought there was a big hardware change, I dunno. What did it do?

MechMantis

The motherboard should support the kit you bought. The kit you have is DDR3 1333. The motherboard supports DDR3 2200/1600/1333/1066/800. My gut instinct is bad RAM.

Essee

Yeah, especially considering the RAM was already working just fine for you, it's pretty clearly not an incompatibility issue. If the RAM isn't bad for some reason, it is possible there could be a problem with one of the second pair of RAM slots on the motherboard, but bad RAM is an extremely common issue when new RAM causes the machine to not boot, so I sincerely doubt that's what it is. And you can test that in the same way you'll be testing the RAM if both chips appear to be functional (again, unlikely).

xPERKx

Upgrading RAM is always fun. First things first, make sure your computers operating system (OS) is fully up to date. Then go to the website of the manufacture of the motherboard and get the latest BIOS version. This how your hardware communicates with the software. How the memory is allocated to use. That should ensure your bases are covered. Now for the tricky trouble shooting;
- You can seed several sticks of memory in at a time to isolate a possible faulty stick of RAM. One bad stick and the whole thing will will go broke.
- By also swapping out known good RAM with unknown RAM it will help test the capacity of the operating system. As far as I know Windows 7 or OS X MAC are the only series of OS that can handle more than 8 GB with out some third party drivers.
- Check your device manager. Before swapping make sure all drivers are good. If you have any yellow triangles with a black "!", then something is up. These errors could compound the situation.
- Last make sure no static is around when you seed the RAM. Any jolt will ruin equipment.

I do agree that as along as you have DDR3 a.k.a. PC3 and that is what is printed on the motherboard, hardware capability is not the issue. Take a crack at it and let us know?

Essee

Yeah... uhh... just FYI... Windows Update and new drivers are not likely to help this situation. I don't believe there are ever any drivers for your RAM, and similarly, OS updates verrrry likely have nothing to do with this. As for whether your OS can support more than 8GB of RAM... I actually hadn't thought about it, but according to Microsoft that would only be an issue on the Home Basic versions of Win7 or Vista. Of course, this likely has nothing to do with the original problem because you presumably didn't even get into Windows (did you?), but it's informative at least (you may notice that, in fact, nearly every 64-bit version of Windows except those two reads at least 16GB of memory).

A BIOS update, yeah, that could fix things if the RAM actually appears to be good. But otherwise, you just need to do hardware troubleshooting. And yeah, I hope you know this already, but try to minimize static and ground yourself when you're messing around in there by touching a metal part of the case (or better yet, get one of those anti-static wristbands) to avoid any chance of zapping components. I maintain, though, that you probably just have a bad stick of RAM and probably nothing else will be relevant to you. :P

xPERKx

There are PCi chip set drivers that work with the motherboard that CAN affect the RAM. Also over 8 GB of RAM is only usable when you have at least service pack 1 installed (SP1) on the system. I tried to keep it simple.

Rye

Thanks for the suggestions, guys!

One more piece of evidence - when i was originally seating the RAM while building the computer the first time, I think I ended up having to shift ram around because it wouldn't boot. However, I attributed this to not correctly seating them to work as a dual channel (every other seat versus 2 consecutive seats - ABAB instead of AABB).

This makes me think that maybe the motherboard might have something wrong with it, which sucks because I think I'm way outside the warranty.

I'll re-seat the "good" ram in the other slots to confirm.

Also, just to clear it up, I'm running Windows 7 Pro 64bit SP1- it ought to be able to use the 16gb of ram.

EDIT - I ended up using the recover CD because it claimed I made hardware changes. Everything went back to as it was before, so although everything's fixed I didn't want to jump back in and risk doing more damage.

Rye

UPDATE -

So, I swapped in my other RAM and it was functional. However, I still can't get 4 dimms to work at the same time. I tried some other things like flipping the "OV DRAM" switch (adding voltage) and that got it to boot once. I checked the installed RAM in windows, and it was giving me "16gb (8 Usable)", si I doubt it was actually working correctly. But then it stopped booting with 4 sticks again.

The RAM was lower voltage, I thought (1.5v) so I don't know what the problem is. I thought I could manually set some voltage numbers in the BIOS, but I can't get it to boot with 4 anymore. Any more advice?

Deusfaux

unfortunately, lots of mobos over the years have known issues with accepting 4 sticks of ram. I'd do some research around your particular board to rule that out

Rye

Something I want to try is leaving 2 sticks in, adjusting the voltage in the BIOS (1.6v instead of 1.5) then insert the 3rd and 4th dimms and see if that doesn't work.

zilo

Definitely don't over-volt your RAM. If it's rated for 1.5v, don't crank it to 1.6v and expect it to not fry itself.

Can you boot with 3 sticks in?

Demerdar

Make sure your motherboard is seated properly. I had a problem similar to yours, where I was able to boot with a couple of sticks, but when I filled up the rest of the DIMM slots it would just fail to boot. Either it would fail a rudimentary motherboard POST ram test or not even boot up at all. Turns out I had a few too many brass spacers underneath my MOBO which was creating some sort of weird "short".

I am not joking.

Rye

Well, I think maybe I could adjust the timings or something. A search for "GA-P55A-UD3 4 dimms" found a few threads about it, this one in particular piqued my interest: http://forum.giga-byte.co.uk/index.php?topic=4389.0

Does any of that sound like it might help? I've NEVER had to adjust timings for a kit to work before, as I don't usually dabble with any kind of overclocking etc.

Demerdar

Do yourself a favor.

Take my advice and make sure you mounted your motherboard correctly. It will take about 20 minutes and could just solve your problem. I'm telling you I had a problem just like yours (except with a dual socket MOBO). I was having just weird memory problems that made little to no logical sense. Turns out I had a bit of a short (not necessarily one that prevented me from turning the MOBO on) that was causing the memory to fault in a seemingly "random" way that doesn't make any sense.