On Saturday 14 January 2006 17:27, Ryan Sims wrote: > I just bought a 512M stick of Crucial ram to complement another 512M > stick...suddenly I'm getting tons of crashes, reboots, failed > compiles, etc. I removed the new stick, and all is well, now I'm > trying just the new stick alone, see if perhaps it was the both > together... > > Something odd I've noticed, however: the new stick takes longer > during the BIOS memory check...i.e. the old stick (infineon, I > believe) the numbers go by essentially instantaneously. The new > stick, however, I watch them tick past for a good second (unless I hit > ESC, of course) This is true if the two sticks are in together, or if > only the new stick is in. Is this indicative of something? I'm > already pretty convinced that it's a bad stick, but I wondered if > anyone could shed further light for me. > > -- > Ryan W Sims
If you got the Crucial stick from them, not second hand, it's very unlikely it's bad- they test them at the factory- I've never gotten a bad stick from them in many years of building computers. Does the Crucial stick by itself cause the problems? Have you tried changing which stick is in ram slot 1- that's the slot that will control the memory HZ and timings. If they aren't compatible, you may have problems. For example, if a faster pc3200 stick is in slot 1, and a slower pc2700 stick in slot 2, you can have problems, as it will be forced to try and run are a higher speed that it can handle. I assume you have reset the sticks in the slots. What about overheating? What about checking the ram timings in the bios. What about the power supply? There's a lot of things that could cause this, but if your box boots and runs normally for a short while, them problems start occurring, I'd suspect overheating- maybe the second stick blocks airflow to the first stick- it's unlikely, but who knows? Maybe you moved some ribbon cables around in the case when you added the new stick, and disrupted air flow that way. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
