I'm having some serious grief with my PC right now... Here's the spec: DFI LanParty NFII Ultra-B Motherboard (2004/11/24 DB24 BIOS) Enermax EG651P-VE 650W PSU (NEW) - used to be Aerocool Aeropower II+ Acrylic-Titanium Plated 550W 2 x 512Mb KingMax SuperRam PC433 DDR Ram Saphire Radeon 9800Pro 128Mb 256bit BenQ 822A DVD±RW Drive Samsung 80Gb ATA133 IDE HDD I cant seem to get it stable at ANY frequency in Dual Channel mode (DIMM slots 1 & 3) any more... well... anything above 180FSB, it keeps crashing! BSOD, Random Reboots... Running 1 stick of the memory in DIMM slot 1, its fine upto 220FSB x 12.5, no reboots, crashes, anything! Running both sticks in DIMM slots 1 & 2 (NOT Dual Channel mode) works fine upto 200FSB x 12.5 I've played with voltages, tried adjusting timings for the memory, but get nothing memtest86+ reports NO errors at all, this is when memory is in both Dual Channel & also not in dual channel... but still it randomly reboots & bombs out... At first I though it an issue with the latest release of Catalyst drivers, as I also got loads of VPU Recover errors, but rolling back to Omega 2.5.58 (Catalyst 4.7) resolved this issue straight out & from what I read, its an issue with the 4.8+ catalyst drivers with the extra instruction sets which casues the GPU to overheat more on simple tasks... Also... reading up on the NF2 compatibility issues with Dual Channel RAM, I've come across references saying to use 2 x 512Mb Samsung PC3200 ram, as these are VERY overclockable & also Extremely Stable on the NF2 chipset... so would it be worth forking out £85 to give this a go?? The PC has now been stable for 6 hours, both Prime & SuperPi, Doom 3 & HL2 work fine also... this is with DIMM slots 1 & 2 in use, so no Dual Channel, and also running 200x12.5@1.75v... if I up the FSB any more, it WILL crash out...
Dual channel on Nforce2 is a joke tbh. Gains are about 1-2%, so for example 230mhzSC>220mhzDC. I had some Kingmax DDR466 on my NF7-S and the max in dual channel was 225mhz~. The max in single channel was 247mhz, and needless to say it performed so much better. Also check that the Nforce2 chipset cooler is making good contact with the chipset - i'd re-apply a thin layer a thermalpaste.
I've already re-greased & cleaned out all coolers on the system, and used arctic silver 5 compound on all components, temps did lower slightly but still there averaging around +7 to +12C higher than ambient on Chipset & +9 to +14C on CPU... GPU I cant measure the temp for if the gains are really that miniscule, I might just leave the ram in slots 1 & 2, and just save for a single 1Gb stick of RAM...
I have the exact same problem with my NF7-s motherboard which also uses the NF2 chipset, i can get 225x11.5 when the ram is in single channel, but putting it into dual channel i can't get beyond about 210x11.5 reliably. I was thinking it must be the northbridge overheating due to the extra bandwidth going through it, but havent got round to getting a new cooler yet. EDIT: Looks like ill go for single channel RAm configuration in order to get the extra clock speed then too.
