Instability with 3 sticks of ram

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hyperspace
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Post by hyperspace »

It may be due to insufficient current being provided from your power supply. Are you running dual?
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hyperspace
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Post by hyperspace »

I agree. Don't think it's the power supply. Sometimes, rearranging the memory sticks in the slots might allow all three to work.
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johnli
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Post by johnli »

You say you've tried alternating the sticks, does that include alternating the slots they're in? Could be you have a dodgy ram slot.
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Post by johnli »

Yeah seems odd to me too, I use all three with no problem.

It could be as simple as the motherboard not quite liking running at that FSB with the extra ram in there, so that might be worth trying. The issue there is what makes the better performace, an extra few MHz or half as much ram again...
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Post by InactiveX »

I used to have 2x366@550 when only 1 stick was used. I now have 3 sticks=768MB, and can only overclock to 500. However, the RAM increase is worth more to me than a few extra MHz.

YMMV.
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BCN
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Post by BCN »

well, I also had the same problem when I was sticking three sticks of 256MB ram...

Well, less craches with two od them. as some other people say they were not running into such kind of problems, I would say that it is not that it is ram that is faulty, especially if it works when you put just one stick at a time.
I think there might be those damn capacitors!... :evil:

You see, I did not use my BP6 for 8 months, but now I had to bot it up again (due to the memory problems with my P4 system) and the story is even stranger...

at 2x366@550 with 256MB or 320MB of ram it crashes more or less in 1-10 minutes, completely randomly. It does not influence here having AGP 1/1 or 2/3 - at least i did not notice any noticeable difference....

and then you know, i can be crash free at 366MHz for few days, provided I do not play any music on it (I have already taken out my SB), do not use any 3D or the kind and do not overstress the CPU's.

Provided that the system is the same and the stability of it was deteriorating gradually over time. I am not afaraid to make a conclusion that here we have faulty caps, and maybe already itchy voltage regulators... (the last one is just a hypothesis).

I have even replaced an old 200W PSU with 400W unit when I was having an average of 3.0V (and less) on 3.3V line when using 768MB of ram, but it did not help the problem - I was having an increasing number of crashes...

Let's change the caps, guys and then see what it makes - I bet there will be a difference! :)
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Post by BCN »

ah?

and why is it more stable at lower frequency? I think the capacitor's fault is more important at higher frequency and we just get more SYMPTOMS! :)

Good Luck!
Dual C366@550MHz 1.90V :) (History)
yet single PIII-S 512Kb L2 cache at 1400MHz@700MHz
BP6 (not modded yet)
256MB PC133 C2
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Maxtor 2x60Gb - all on promise ATA133
Lite-On LTR 40125S@48125W!!!
Plus P4 system
Wolfram
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Post by Wolfram »

I remembered this thread (and this one? http://www.bp6.com/board/viewtopic.php? ... sticks+ram... same title, same date) and I've just tried to put a third 256MB-stick on my BP6.

With the third stick, I had to set the CAS latency down to 3. OK, np. BUT I also kept losing my keyboard & mouse controls (both PS2) after a few hours of work. The machine was still running, but no input was possible. Happened each time I ran the system with all three RAM sticks. Didn't try to clock it down to 366 (from 523).

My BP6 isn't perfect anymore (three caps with symptoms), but it hardly ever crashes with only two RAM sticks. And it never had this mouse/keyboard problem before. I also tried to cure it by setting IRQ12 to legacy ISA (though I didn't believe it would help in this case), to no avail.
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Post by loophole »

It sounds to me like it's bad voltage regulation on the 3.3V line. You can do mods to fix this. Yoichiro's BP6 Modification Guide does exactly that:

http://geta.yoh-tech.com/bp6/eng_analisys.htm

I'm building up another BP6 system but before I do anything (even buying the rest of the parts - second CPU, memory, etc) I'm going to do Yoichiro's stability mods on my BP6 (version 1.0, 0.41). It'll take a while but it will be worth it :D

In my last BP6 system I had 640MB RAM (2 x 256MB + 1 x 128MB) and it worked perfectly at 110MHz FSB (4.5 x 495) and CAS 2.

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Post by Wolfram »

Nice. I never actually read this article because I thought the mod was only for stabilizing the core voltage(s). Unfortunately, I've never done any SMD soldering :( Maybe one day...
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Post by loophole »

I may leave out the SMD stuff - those resistors are too tiny. If I do end up doing it, it will be after lots of practice on stuff that doesn't matter if I stuff it up :D

I'm just going to replace all the caps first and if all that goes well, I may give the other stabilisation mods a go (that will probably be a while away though).

loophole.
Still kicking along with the Abit BP6 :-)
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