P4 Mother Boards

[Kerry Thompson]

I bought a new P4 2.2 computer system three months ago and have had major stability problems with Viz 4. After working through many sequences, Viz works OK when I have only one stick of 512Kb DDR 333 memory in, but not two sticks. As soon as it gets to 1Mb, the thing crashes (blue screens), or just stops. (I am running Window 2000 SR2)

The motherboard I an using at the moment is an ASUS P4S333 supposedly supports DDR 333 but it transpires that it will only support DDR333 in sticks 256Kb or less making the total amount of RAM reliably possible only 768Mb. I have gone down to DDR 266 to see if the system is any more stable and so far it appears to be. There does not seem to be any motherboards available that support full 512Mb sticks of DR333 memory. The marketing talks about 333 memory speeds but in reality, the motherboards I have seen only support very specialised memory configurations at this speed. I would appreciate any comments.

 

Kerry Thompson

[Greg Hess]

Quick notes....

 

All motherboards that support PC1600 or PC2100 support any current designation of PC####. The # for the ram is not a fixed speed, but the speed that the ram is theoretically able to obtain.

 

Example...PC2700 should be able to run at a 333 FSB (166 DDR) at cas 2.5 or cas 3. However this standard recently changed "again" so it could be PC3000 now.

 

What actually determines the speed of your ram is your Front side bus speed, and your cpu/agp/pci/mem dividers.

 

Each motherboard handles this completely differently. Some motherboards allow for incremental fsb changes, which effect every component of the system. Aka if you raise the fsb to 166 from 133 (Its DDR so 266 to 333) the AGP and PCI speeds go way past spec, as well as your processor being overclocked to well beyond its original speed.

 

If you can change the dividers however, you could redivide the cpu/pci/agp spec's independently of the memory, and allow just the memory to run at a higher speed. Once again, this is motherboard dependent, and may or may not be available with a particular board or choice.

 

The most important thing to remember is....

 

cheap ram is just that. Its cheap. Ram is not constructed the same way by various companies. Only a few use certain construction processes to ensure high quality ram through incredibly stressful situations. Mushkin and Corsair XMS are currently the only two ram types I'm recommending for DDR systems.

 

Also remember to run memtests, to make sure your not overclocking your ram.

 

www.mushkin.com/support

 

takes about 30-60 minutes depending on system speed. Even 1 error means a bad dimm.

 

Hope that helps address some of your questions.

[Kerry Thompson]

Thanks very much for this Greg. I have been using PC2100 memory and the system seems far more stable.

 

Regards

 

Kerry Thompson

[CHE]

Greg,

 

How can I make my memory run at DRR333? Right now is runing at 266. The problem is that the system becomes unstable whenever I overclock it. I'm very disappointed with IWILL and OCZ. I'm even thinking about buying a new motherboard and memory. Could you give me some comments, what would be the best to do? could I upgrade the memory to 1 GB?

I have an IWILL XP333R rev 2.1 motherboard with 3 OCZ 256MB dimms of PC 3000 (I'm using the 3 slots). My processor is an AMD XP 2000+ . Windows XP Pro SP1. Elsa Gloria 3 (Quadro 2 PRO).

[Greg Hess]

Hey CHE,

 

Luckily Iwill has an entire support forum just for your motherboard! Basically your going to have to do alotta of bios tweaking to get your ram up to 333. Here's a url to the forum, if I get a chance I'll browse it and throw some more info your way.

 

http://www.x-faqtor.com/xp333.htm

 

Oh damn. looks like they gutted it. Check some of the links off that page at least.

[CHE]

Greg,

 

I'll check out that link, Thank you.