Sunday, January 04, 2004

Asus A7N8X DDR

Well, that's interesting... the memory stick (B) that I thought was bad survived 9 hours and 34 passes of the default MemTest86 tests when it was the only stick in the computer (in slot 1). The test that failed was configured as 1/B, 3/A (slot 1 had stick B, slot 3 had stick A). I'm now testing stick A (in slot 1) to see if that memory stick is as good as I thought (it worked fine through 2 passes).

According to the manual, to do DDR, you put sticks in slots 1/3 or 2/3 if you want DDR with 2 sticks of memory. I don't know if it means anything, but on my motherboard, slot 1 is made of black plastic while slots 2/3 are made of blue plastic. That might be a clue that it's better to fill slots 2/3 if you have two sticks of RAM.

So I put memory in configuration, 2/B+3/A, and ran MemTest86. It went through two passes with zero errors, so I gave it a boot-up into WinXP. Well, it only took an hour for SC4 to start crashing every 15-30 minutes, so apparently that memory configuration is no good. (The second crash reset the PC.) So now the question is... is one of my memory modules bad and I just haven't found the problem yet? Or is there simply a problem with trying to run this particular brand of memory in DDR mode? (FYI, a link to the Asus approved memory list for the A7N8X motherboard.)

Ran configuration 1/B through 9 hours of MemTest86 without any problems. Going to configure as 1/B+2/A (both sticks on the first memory channel, non-DDR configuration) to see if possibly it's an issue that the memory simply won't work in a two-channel setup. If this works, I'll be happy with the extra memory, but sad that I won't see the 60% performance boost (estimated) from running dual-channel.

Well, setting up both DIMMs in DDR channel 1 didn't work either... so now I'm going to patch the BIOS to the latest (I have the v2 motherboard, but the 1001G revision of the BIOS) which is version 1007. Then I'll fire up SC4 on a large city and see if it runs a few hours without crashing. If that works then I'll put them back into a dual-channel setup and test again.

Update: Well, the box has been up and running a SimCity4 city for almost 24 hour straight without a crash. So the memory is good, but the BIOS needed to be updated. Gonna benchmark the single-channel setup, switch to dual-channel DDR mode and re-benchmark later.

Labels: Benchmarks

posted by Wuphon's at 8:42 AM