joanne said:
Hi does anyone know of compatibility issues between different brands of
memory modules or motherboards? I have bought 2 second hand 512 mb pc3200
modules and on of them brings up a dram error beep at post when installed.
The vendor says it was perfect when sent! Is it defiantly no good or could
it be non compatible.
Also what effect does the CL rating have? Can I mix CL2.5 With CL3? I have a
four slot dual channel mobo with 2x512 already installed both CL2.5 and 2x
512 to add 1 at CL3 and the other which seems to be faulty has no CL
specified.
Cheers
You didn't say what motherboard this is. And if this was an
Athlon64 processor, we'd need to know the revision of the
processor as well. Capabilities differ between Revision E
or later, and the earlier revisions.
A program like CPUZ can give you some of that info, but
the label on the box the CPU came in, has the OPN on it,
which is much easier to deal with. And the motherboard
model number is probably printed in large white letters,
on the surface of the motherboard.
Generally speaking, if the motherboard manual has a table
showing where a single DIMM should be placed, you would test
each new DIMM, singly, in that particular socket. Removing
all the other DIMMs, so you know exactly what the test
results are telling you. If it beeps that way, it could
be that the DIMMs are actually different types - maybe
one is unbuffered and the other registered ? Visually, do
they have similar chip counts ? How many chips on each DIMM ?
If the processor is Rev D or CG, in other words, a revision
before Revision E, then the population rules are more
restrictive. Depending on the BIOS, it may have issues
with the pairs of DIMMs. I have heard of cases, where
four matching DIMMs were inserted, and the BIOS ignored
two of them. In that case, the SPD on two of the DIMMs,
indicated a different revision of PCB used to build the
DIMM! And that has nothing to do with matching, at
the BIOS level. But the BIOS was stupidly designed,
and that is what happened. On a Revision E processor or
later, the processor can be put in Virtual Single channel
mode, which reduces performance, but at least then there
is no complaints from the BIOS.
So test them one at a time first, and see if the dead one
is still dead.
Paul
