Memory Management

[Guest]

After suffering through the betas and then running a hacked copy of Vista
Ultimate x64 for most of the year, I was sufficiently satisfied that Vista
was stable for my system that I bought my own (not cheap). The importance of
this will become obvious later.

My system is an Asus A8N32-SLI, Athlon 3800+, 4x512M Corsair, 3 SATA's
striped RAID 5 Nvidia mode, Nvidia 7600 GT, two monitors of unequal
resolution on each DVI, the principal in portrait and the accessory in
landscape. BIOS settings are defaults excepting that the gameport is
disabled as Vista doesn't support this. Nothing is currently on the Silicon
Image ports.

I long formatted the drive and installed Vista clean. During a reboot after
the second or third visit to Windows Update, I repeatedly BSOD'd with
memory_management and netio.sys errors, not being able to get past Safe mode.
I cannot remember in what sequence the nforce and video drivers were updated
but we learn to click on install and reboot until Update says it is happy.

Someone suggested in a non Microsoft forum to remove the upper gig of RAM.
Crazy but I gave it a shot and voila, it boots and runs well, albeit slowly.
Not to be foiled by chance, I put back in the gig of memory and booted to the
BSOD again. Memtest x 24h shows no problems. Device manager is happy.

So my illegal copy of Vista ran well and my legal copy has some hiccoughs
reminiscent of the betas. The only major difference I can think of is that
with the illegal copy I always ran the latest Nvidia drivers from Nvidia's
website as they came out and currently I'm using only the Windows update
drivers. Unless someone has a suggestion here, my next step will be to
install the Nvidia platform although I read in the forums that people had no
problems until they did this.

I hope this post is informative to someone troubleshooting or developing.

 

[Drew]

I don't know whether you want these 3 cents but hey I will toss them out
anyways...On my system I am running Vista business on a Intel D975XBX2
motherboard running 4gigs of ddr800 Kingston HyperX..Now here is the
kicker...When I first booted up it crashed consistently until I replaced the
ram with 2 MATCHED pairs...After that the system has been screaming fast and
stable as a rock for about 8 months...all software ,,apps and games are
smooth as silk...My 3 Video cards (ATI crossfire's) are also extremely
smooth....I also tried memtest with the original ram and nothing showed as a
glitch but once swapped we are talkin butter.....Go figure !!
Just my 3 cents...... Best of luck.............Drew

 

[Guest]

I'm sure this well help someone. As for me, my matched pairs worked fine
until I reinstalled. It is an interesting point because I originally
installed my illegal copy with one gig of RAM and then bought another gig of
the same five months later (and had no problems).

 

[f/fgeorge]

I'm sure this well help someone. As for me, my matched pairs worked fine
until I reinstalled. It is an interesting point because I originally
installed my illegal copy with one gig of RAM and then bought another gig of
the same five months later (and had no problems).

But you have 4 pieces of memory, you can have a matched pair, but that
is still only 2 pieces, again you have 4 pieces. There is probably a
slight difference between the sets that is causing your issues, try
buying one matched pair of 1 gig each peice and see if that fixes your
problem. You could try and get a matched set of 4 pieces but that is
extrememly hard to find and probalby very expensive. You said 5 months
later from one set of 2 pieces to the other set of 2 pieces, that is
not a matched set or 4.

 

[Guest]

All Corsair, same model #, size, and timings from the same vendor. I agree,
there could be subtle differences not reflected in the merchandising or what
is reflected in the BIOS setup but I hate to sink another $150 into an
already obsolete motherboard (DDR & Socket 939) if there is an obvious and
easy fix that I've missed.

 

[Guest]

In addition, the fly in the ointment is that Vista worked fine for four
months with this hardware until I reinstalled. Is it possible that the
original RTM is different than the edition currently on shelves?

 

[Guest]

Installing the nforce drivers made no difference but with all this talk
insisting on the RAM being matched, I put each pair into Bank 0 and looked at
the timings in the BIOS. You are right, there was a subtle difference in the
default timing for each pair. By overriding the automatic settings and
relaxing Trcd out a notch, I was able to boot with both pairs in and still
able to keep CL at 2 at a command rate of 1T. The hard fault rate in the
Reliability Monitor appeared subjectively the same. I installed Bioshock as
a real world test and got through a level without any crashes.

Thanks