PCTech Forums

Yes It does work when I do it that way. I am trying to up grade the memory it is all the same speed and it will not work when I use 512 on all the slots when according to the user manual it should work. Thank you for your response.

Maybe one of the sticks is bad.... 1.28mb ram isn't "all that shabby" either.
brad

All sticks are good I booted with each and everyone of them also I figured out in a discussion with a friend that the info in the user manual is incorrect. I have 4 dimm slots that are color coded dimm 1 is orange and dimm 3 is orange dimm 2 is blue and dimm 4 is blue, Channel a consist of dimm 1 and 2, channel b is dimm 3 and 4. When I put a 512 DS stick in dimm 1 and 3 I got error when I put 512 ds of ramm in dimm 1 and 3 it also gave error. Through trial and tribulation I stuck a 512 DS in dimm 1 and a 256 SS in dimm 3 which are the same color code orange. I then stuck a 512 DS stick in dimm 2 which is channel A when dual is activated and I did not get any errors when booting. I then put a 256 SS stick in dimm 4 again no errors. If you follow the pattern above Channel A has 2 512 DS sticks and channel B has 2 SS 256 sticks. I stressed DS and SS because the above are the only combinations I can use to get my system to run with 4 Memory sticks. I really do appreciate your help and although I am new to this forum I look forward to future questions and answers.
Almost forgot I spoke with a friend who does nothing but work on PC so he also came to the conclusion that the user manual is incorrect and I sent them a message to explain the situation to maybe help others in the future.

Appreciate your follow-up. Good luck. brad

I think I may be getting this same problem. My PC boots up ok but after a few minutes it will reboot itself. It sometimes also gets halfway through the boot up process and then starts again but there is no consistency to it. This is on win2000 pro too, not xp.

Yesterday I got a DVD burner, firewire card and a 512 DS memory stick to whack in against my existing two 256 SS memory sticks. All are PC333.

I initially put the 512 stick in slot 3 (I only have 3 slots) but the PC only recognised the already existing 512 memory (i.e. 256 x 2). I then moved one of the 256 sticks to slot 3 and moved the 512 DS stick to slot one and and it recognised I had more memory but not the whole lot... something like 975075. (I'm writing this from work PC so cannot check exact amount).

My query is to do with the "channel A" akiem mentions. Where can I view/change this information? Also, is a dimm simply the memory slot number?

Man I hope this is the problem anyway. I thought it must have been the firewire card or dvd burner causing the problem and after stuffing around/removing/re-installing them both it was still happening.

Thanks in advance.

Hi Brad

I use win2000 pro, have a P4 2.0G with a GA-8IG gigabyte mobo and Intel 845G chipset.

It's definitely something to do with the new memory stick and not the dvd burner or fireware card (which is good cause at least I can use my new toys ). I moved the sticks to various positions last night and it was only when I used the 512 stick in seemed to stuff up, although I did boot up with just the new stick in it but in hindsight I may not have allowed it to run long enough to see if it restarted it self (will do so tonight). It also seemed to recognise the whole memory amount (524K?) on boot up.

If I put the 512 stick in slot 1 and the other two 256K sticks in slots 2&3 it would only recognise 768K. If I put the 512 stick in slot 3 and the other sticks in slots 1&2 it would recognise 917050, not the 1024K I would expect to see.

When I just used the existing 2 x 256 sticks everything worked fine. I then consulted the manual for the mobo and it said:

The motherboard has 3 dual inline memory module (DIMM) sockets, but it can only support a maximum of 4 banks of DDR memory .

DDR slot uses 2 banks, DDR slot 2&3 share the remaining 2 banks.

Support Unbuffered DDR DIMM sizes type:

256 Mbit (8Mx8x4 banks)
256 Mbit (4Mx16x4 banks)
512 Mbit (16Mx8x4 banks)
512 Mbit (8Mx16x4 banks)

Note: Double sided x16 DDR memory devices are not supported by Intel 845E/G chipset

I don't know what these "banks" are though and what the three sets of numbers mean.

Further, it gives the following configurations in a table:

DDR1........................DDR2.........................DDR3
S.................................S................................S
D.................................S................................S
D.................................D................................X
D.................................X................................D
S.................................D................................X
S.................................X................................D

Where D = double sided DIMM, S= single sided and X = not used.

From this, "bank" depending though, it appears as though I should be able to use the stick.

So what do you reckon? Is it the stick or my mobo?

Thanks

Guess I'm missing something.......
Are you mixing SD-RAM and DDR-SD-RAM? If so, that's the problem. They don't play well together. You can mix sizes but not types.
brad

Yeah they are all DDR

I've come to the conclusion it has something to do with having all three dimms filled. When I only use two of them everything is sweet, no matter what combination of sticks I use. When I fill the third dimm though I get the restart probs *shrugs*

Could be worth looking for a BIOS upgrade if that's the case?