Hello all, Back in November I had a problem where windows kept dying / pc not booting, and I traced this to a fault RAM stick (1GB out of 3 1GB sticks). I've now got some more for christmas, however due to the unavailability of the original RAM (OCZ Reaper 8500 HPC) I got some kingston hyperX stuff (two of these), which based on the specs I thought the same (DDR2 1066Mhz 5-5-5-15). I installed the extra 2 1GB sticks, turned the pc on and it correctly reported that 4GB was installed, and that the memory was running at 1066Mhz. The system then got into the windows logon screen, blue screened and restarted. This happened several times at various points (during windows loading / just after login etc.) so I removed the new RAM and everything returned to normal. I checked with memtest and it passed, however I spotted that the speed quoted on there was 333 for the OCZ and 400 for the Kingston. I dropped the RAM speed down to 800 (Q6600 FSB 400 multiplier 8) and everything boots fine. I'm assuming it's something to do with the RAM speed, however I thought that if one was slower then the system would run at the slower rate, although I'm also confused as from what I can tell the memory is the same spec? Here's some CPU-Z information, which makes even less sense to me as it says the OCZ is PC2-5300 and the OCZ is PC2-6400, when I thought they should both be PC2-8500? Sorry for the rambling and apologies if I'm fundamentally misunderstanding how this works, any help appreciated!
Needs more voltage to run at 1066. Set manually in bios ram voltage to 1.9 - 2.1 (start lower and increase until stable), timings to 5-5-5-15, 533mhz. Seems the problem is there is no xmp (epp) profile for the kingston, so you will have to set everything in bios as it only can detect the spd profiles, which are mismatch.
Ok I'll give that a go, thanks. Can you shed any light as to why the OCZ memory shows PC2-5300 when it's PC2-8400 (as from what you've said that does have an xmp profile)?
Hello again, I tried upping the voltage, however even when I got to the recommend maximum of 2.1 volts it still doesn't work at 1066. Something I have however noticed is that in CUP-Z it still shows a voltage of 1.8V (across all sticks) - is this a misreading or am I changing the wrong setting? I've been upping the DRAM value in the BIOS.
It will always show the same values under spd, as they are hardcoded on the ram. You'll have to use a different info tool, as cpu-z dosen't show voltage on the memory tab which shows current setting. Use speccy instead to verify. But if you set the correct setting in bios, and it shows it in bios, then it is running at those setting.
