[Ganku]

Sup folks, I'm new to your community and I'm hoping someone may have a little advice. I'm an above average user who has built several systems and done a lot of troubleshooting and repairs but this has me stumped.

A friend asked me to help with an upgrade on his current system. New psu, video card, and more ram. It is the ram portion I'm stumped on.

He had 2 x 512mb ddr400 on an asus p4p800 deluxe mb with a 3g proc. He purchased 2 more 512 sticks and we installed them. System before new ram upgrade ran with bios settings to auto at 400mhz. When we installed the new ram it drops to 266 on auto. Hmmm. So we uninstalled the new ram and it reverts back to 400. We then replaced the old ram with just the new ram and now it ran at 320.. very odd, when we set the bios on manual settings and give it the proper multipliers and settings we get a mb error that says o/c has failed and it wants to reload default settings. We then thought possibly one stick or another was bad, when we took out all of the ram and tryed with just 1 stick at a time it ran at 400 on auto and with the settings on manual, same with the other sticks. when I put it all back in again it reverts back to 266.....What the...???? I know it doesn't offer any diffinitive answers but memtest shows no errors, Is there something I'm missing here?

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Asus has always been finicky about ram. Quite often if you use 4 sticks of ram the motherboard will revert back to 333 speed because of timing issues. Some of the MB's can't even run 333 and reset to 320 which would look like it's at 266 speed.

There is also a thing about AMD processors that will only allow 333 ram speed if over 3 sticks of memory is used. You did not state what yours is but i think it is a pentium 478 cpu, so this would not apply.

At another forum they talk about ASUS'es clock ratio where the ram is set at 4/5 speed. So if you happen to run a 400 FSB intel processor the ram would run at 320 which would show as 266 speed.

You need to look into your BOS for the timing you have, and be very careful about raising the timing. It can quickly result in a non-booting computer.

SRX660

[SRX660]

Asus has always been finicky about ram. Quite often if you use 4 sticks of ram the motherboard will revert back to 333 speed because of timing issues. Some of the MB's can't even run 333 and reset to 320 which would look like it's at 266 speed.

There is also a thing about AMD processors that will only allow 333 ram speed if over 3 sticks of memory is used. You did not state what yours is but i think it is a pentium 478 cpu, so this would not apply.

At another forum they talk about ASUS'es clock ratio where the ram is set at 4/5 speed. So if you happen to run a 400 FSB intel processor the ram would run at 320 which would show as 266 speed.

You need to look into your BOS for the timing you have, and be very careful about raising the timing. It can quickly result in a non-booting computer.

SRX660

[Ganku]

thanks I will check to see if any of the timing changes when I load the ram. I will take all of it off of the mb and replace it in different order and try to see if there are any changes... thank you for taking the time to reply.