Ok, Crucial's memory RMA came in over a week ago. Two new modules.

The ASUS mobo came in today. Same board I sent in. No visible signs of any rework. No description of what was tested/done included with shipment nor available on their RMA status web interface. The board was in "repairing" status for over a week before it was shipped back to me.

Time to put this all back together and then burn it in again with Prime95. Fingers crossed.

Heh.. I got an ASUS board back from RMA here last week. This board was extremely fussy about RAM -- the modules would work only in two of the four slots, and then only with one particular model of RAM. It was even weirder than that, but very difficult to describe.

The board that came back may or may not be the exact same unit. It certainly has the same MAC addr for the onboard ethernet, so it's probably the same board.

RAM slots seem to work now, though. No notes or anything about what was done to it.

Cheers

I certainly couldn't tell simply by looking at the board itself whether it's the same one or not. But what gave it away was the serial number sticker.

It's all put together now the same as it was when I last ran the Prime95 tests. I'll let it run all night if I have to - last time it failed in a single afternoon.

EDIT: Prime95 running 11 hours so far. Knock on wood.

The torture test has now run for over 24 hours. I'll restart into memtest in a little while and then hopefully move the recordings and cable connection back to this machine and let it resume its PVR life.

Now I'm going to run the Prime95 for another 24 hours.

The ASUS mobo was running the RAM under-spec. It was using a clock of 399MHz (DDR2-800) instead of 533 (DDR2-1066) and the latency was 5-5-5-18 instead of 5-5-5-15.

If I set the mobo with Memory Frequency to AUTO, it will run 399MHz even though it's also set to use SPD. So I turned off SPD to set the latencies manually, set the clock manually and even set the voltage manually.

I'd really love to know if the SPD data is incorrect or if the mobo is simply not using it properly. Is anyone able to understand the output of the SPD tool sufficiently if I post it?

Is this the same EPP RAM from before? If so then unless your board specifically supports the EPP extensions, it will run it at conservative settings. Blame the tweakers for EPP. It is mainly for overclocking RAM.

What board and RAM do you have?


533MHz is DDR2-1066.

It's the same brand/model of memory as before, but new parts. Crucial Ballistix DDR2-1066. I must have written "1600" due to my newly emerging dyslexia.

The mobo is the exact same one as before. As mentioned I have no idea what has been done to it.

The memory before with all settings at "auto" weren't the same (low) as they appeared today.

The mobo supports EPP and the modules do as well. I'll try posting the output of one module below.

Yup. You've got Tweaker RAM. The SPD contains a conservative profile. The motherboard is doing the right thing at least regarding reading the standard SPD data.

Do you have to enable EPP on your board? My Abit board needed you to change the settings for it to enable all this stuff. By default it'd run everything at its listed speeds with no tweaks.

It doesn't make any sense to me that I'd have to manually configure specs or "tweak" to get the RAM running at 533MHz, its advertised speed.

I didn't buy this RAM to overclock or otherwise speed-bump any of my settings. I just want to run at rated speeds on everything. CPU running at default settings to get my the advertised 2.66GHz speed. And I assumed, pop in the memory, have the system read its settings, and it should also run at advertised/labeled speeds.

Why label the memory 5-5-5-15 2.0v and then set up the SPD with different numbers?

EPP ("SPD") is enabled by default on my motherboard.

Basically you're buying RAM that was tested by the manufacturer to be able to run at specified overclocked settings. The standard SPD data specification doesn't allow for some of these settings. Thats why it defaults to a very conservative setting. You need the EPP extensions to be able to automatically set everything. Even Crucial say that you may need 1-2 setting changes to handle EPP.


EPP isn't the same as SPD. It specifically says EPP?

No clue why it doesn't work for you though.

Tweaker RAM? Send it to a home in Arizona for a few months.

I can't help noticing that Crucial also sell plain, non-Bollistix DDR2-1066 memory -- at a higher price. The "plain" ones seem to do that data rate at 1.8V without being overvoltaged to 2V.

Peter

I'm not certain if I have to set the voltage to 2.0v to get the 533. They're separate settings in the BIOS, I haven't tried setting only the clock.

On the Crucial site, out of 23 reviews the average rating is 2/5. Lots of people mentioning errors and BSOD. Great. MOst people claiming they can run relatively error free at 400MHz.

This is starting to seem like under-spec memory being falsely advertised as higher-end parts. Not cool to advertise DDR2-800 as DDR2-1066. The funny thing is that they also have DDR2-800 Ballistix modules. Are those 300MHz parts in reality?

To get the rated speed you have to run it at the specified settings including voltage.


Online ratings/reviews are skewed towards the bad side anyway. The posters aren't running it at the specified voltage but still at the higher speed/timings.


No. You bought RAM which tested by the manufacturer to run reliably at modified settings/voltages. If you don't run the RAM at the specified settings then you won't get the rated speeds.

If you bought a regular stick of DDR2-800 would you complain that it won't run properly at 1.2V and it crashes lots? You bought a stick of DDR2-1066 that required 2.0V for DDR2-1066 operation. Pay more and you get a stick of DDR2-106 that runs at 1.8V for DDR2-1066 operation.

Or just buy el-cheapo generic DDR2-1066, no silly heat spreaders, and it will also work fine.

Pretty much. Thats what I do. You won't notice the tiny improvement you get from overclocking it and reducing the timings unless you're using a benchmark utility anyway.

That's precisely why I bought these modules. I didn't give much thought to branding. I just did a search at Canada Computers for the specs I wanted and the best price at the time. This is what was there.

As reported previously in Matt's Shuttle thread, one of the new replacement Ballistics modules died while running at its recommended (and supposedly tested) settings last month.

Yesterday night the second stick finally bit the bullet while running at even lower (safer) settings of 800Mhz.

Bottom line is that Crucial do test these parts for overclocked performance to achieve a DDR2-1066 rating, but the modules are just poor quality crap and they will all fail eventually. One needs only to read the reports on the net of widespread failure of these Ballistix modules.

Taking Crucial up on their warranty is a waste of time, money for shipping and also potential data loss when the replacements fail again. This stick is going to get snapped in half just like the last one.

They're being replaced with Kensington DDR2-800 (on-spec 1.8v parts).

I'm also thinking of replacing the mobo next month with a Gigabyte P45 that features two GigE LAN ports and a good number of PCIe and PCI slots. It doesn't have built-in video so I'll have to toss a cheap $30 video card on it. I do wish more systems had built-in video. It's a waste of slots and money to put a video card into a system that's going to be a server. Seems like everything with built-in video is MicroATX and lacking in the slot department.

I still think you've got something wrong elsewhere. You're getting an excessive amount of failures with new components.

The only other thing that it can possibly be is the motherboard. Which ASUS claims is in perfect working order. The PS has been replaced and both the new one and old one seem to be working flawlessly.

The CPU won't cause the memory to go bad. And the tuner boards (the only cards in the system) work flawlessly in my Shuttle system and have certainly not ever caused any components in that to go bad.

I'm definitely getting that Gigabyte mobo. I'm now off Crucial shit memory products and I don't plan to come back to ASUS any time soon (as mentioned earlier, every single ASUS mobo I've ever had has eventually gone bad). To show you how crap the modules are, I peeled off one of the aluminum "heat spreader" covers and half the memory chips came up with it. The adhesive didn't seem all that strong as it easily peeled off the other remaining chips.

If anyone wants the mobo, they can have it for free - just pay for however much it costs to ship it.

I'll be dropping my Hauppauge PVR-500 very soon since I'm going OTA-only for add-in cards (HVR-1600 and 2250) with an HD-PVR externally for HD satellite capture.

The new memory has been put into the computer and now I just have to repair the Windows installation which unfortunately was damaged in one of the spontaneous reboots/crashes during the night. It claims my hal.dll is corrupted or missing - luckily MS has a KB article about this very issue, so I'll get to see how well their solution works.

Repairing the Windows install was a PITA. Either the whole System32 folder was missing or it went missing after I ran chkdsk. It was instead replaced by a file with 0 byte size. What I didn't know at the time however was that chkdisk had recovered the folder and put it inside a different folder in the root.

None of the recovery steps outlined by MS would work because they weren't intended to repair the whole folder. What should have worked, using the Repair option when re-installing Windows was also not working...

At first I simply wasn't getting that option as the installer would never find a windows installation. The boot.ini was also toast and MS's previous steps didn't repair nor rebuild it. So I copied the boot.ini from my other machine which has been set up previously with the same disk names and folder structure. I also copied that system's System32 folder which was itself also a PITA which required multiple tools to accomplish.

That finally led me to being able to select the repair option during Windows installation when booting from CD. But I still couldn't get the issue fixed because the installer would disable the mouse and keyboard - both USB and PS2 models.

I decided that perhaps I'd better build a new installer disk by slipstreaming SP3 onto my WinXP SP2 install disks. nLite is what I used and it was a smooth build. The new install disk finally let me use my mouse and keyboard and accomplished the repair. After some more dancing in having to swap drives letter assignments for C and D (not as straight forward as using Disk Management) and after some driver re-installs I was back in business.

The new memory has been running in the system without incident. 4GB of Kingston value RAM. A new Gigabyte mobo has been ordered along with the new HVR-2250 and HDPVR. As mentioned, this mobo also required a gfx card, but at least it's only costing me $30. Next week the ASUS mobo goes bye-bye and I do another Install-Repair with another specialized slipstream disk I made (containing the ATI drivers for the new GFX card, all the Gigabyte mobo drivers and the Hauppauge drivers).

Fingers crossed.

New system up and running.

Gigabyte EP45-UD3P (this is one solid-feeling mobo with a lot of expansion room)
4GB Kingston memory mentioned before
New Hauppauge HVR2250 dual-ATSC tuner
Gigabyte ATI Radeon HD 4350
Plus the drives and cards I had before.

Right now I have 6 active tuners in the system. The NTSC tuner will be removed once I cancel my cable subscription and go OTA-only for a few months.

I'm quite impressed with the mobo in comparison with the ASUS. Seems better built and nicely laid out. It's also got a great amount of connections, including 12 USB, 3 Firewire, 2 GigE LAN, 8 SATA ports (6 Intel and 2 Gigabyte), 5 PCI-e slots (2 x16 and 3 x1) and 2 PCI slots.

The Slipstreamed CD I made failed to install any of the third-party (new/additional) drivers. I'm not sure why. I had to pull them off my other system's download folder to get all the new devices configured.

The only complaint/oddity I have is that the mobo brought up my CPU as 2.26GHz instead of 2.66. It was using a multiplier of 8.5 instead of 10 on a 266MHz clock. Its memory voltage setting at "auto" was also over-clocking my ram a bit at 1.9v. I manually set it to 1.8v.

Going to have to burn it in using Prime95 in the next couple of days.

I've been using that very same motherboard for about a year now. Very happy with it, never had a problem.