New Ram causing all this trouble?

MonkeyKong007

Hi Guys,

A couple of weeks ago my primary hard drive almost died so i replaced it . As well that I bought some new DDR II Ram and a new monitor.

I reinstalled my Windows with all the new hardware installed and came across a lot of trouble. It kept on informing me that "windows could not find installer for CDROM" "windows could not find installer for diskdrive" "windows could not find installer for harddrive." I replaced the new DDRII RAM with my old DDR RAM (I have a motherboard that allows DDR and DDRII ram to be installed at seperate times) and installed windows again, this time with no trouble at all. Thinking that was that, I put the new DDRII Ram back in. It worked perfectly apart from when i wanted to install other hardware. I tried to install my soundcard and again it moaned. It said the data on the soundcards drivers CD was "invalid." I reinstalled the old DDR ram, and then installed the soundcard without any trouble. Whats going on? Why is the RAM affecting how other hardware is installed?

The only thing i can think of is my PSU unit is not powerful enough to take the new DDRII ram? That or the DDRII ram is corrupt, but memtest86+ said it was fine.

Thanks


Processor - DualCore Intel Core 2 Duo E4300, 1800 MHz
Motherboard - ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA
Motherboard Chipset - VIA Apollo PT880
Primary Hard Drive Seagate 160GB
Slave Hard Drive Western Digital 320GB
Ram - 2 x 256 MB (PC2100 DDR SDRAM) OR 2 x Ebuyer Extra Value 1GB DDR2 667MHz PC5300
Video Card - NVIDIA GeForce2 MX/MX 400
PSU Unit - 250 Watts

fwor

It's possible that the PSU is a bit low powered for the system, but I doubt this would explain the symptoms, as I doubt that the DDR2 takes significantly more power when compared with the other system components.

Have you checked whether your BIOS is at the most recent revision? Motherboard makers commonly implement more recently-developed hardware poorly in their initial BIOS releases.

MonkeyKong007

thanks fwor. I just updated the bios. The ram i bought is DDRII 667 MHZ, but on automatic my mobo only detects it as 533. When i manually change it to run it at 667 it wont load windows and just keeps restarting just after the windows screen has finished loading. Any ideas?

MonkeyKong007

I read this on another forum. "I have my 4coredual-sata2 working with 4GB of RAM. I am using 2x2GB of "Super Talent" DDR2 800. Initially it was only able to boot with one DIMM populated (single channel) until I changed two parameters in the BIOS: - DRAM frequency = DDR2 667 - DRAM voltage = Low" Would doing the same potentially damage my motherboard?

MonkeyKong007

MonkeyKong007 wrote: »

I read this on another forum. "I have my 4coredual-sata2 working with 4GB of RAM. I am using 2x2GB of "Super Talent" DDR2 800. Initially it was only able to boot with one DIMM populated (single channel) until I changed two parameters in the BIOS: - DRAM frequency = DDR2 667 - DRAM voltage = Low" Would doing the same potentially damage my motherboard?

Tried this and it didn't work!

fwor

I wouldn't alter the default voltage - it's generally the timing that needs tweaking.

Does your BIOS lets you set the individual memory timing parameters? If so, choose the higher overall clock speed but increase the number of clocks for each setting. You can then step them back down to find the quickest stable setting. If you run Memtest after each change you should be able to see when you start to get errors, and back out the last change you made.

If not, you may just have to accept the fact that some motherboard chipsets don't work as well with some makes of memory - I've seen this before on several PCs.