Hey all, I have a Visiontek GF3, Asus A7V, and the 1.2 Tbird and I've come across some craziness... I have two systems, each with (3) 256mb pc133 chips, with three of those sticks being Micron and the other three being Kingston... no probs with any of them... I installed the Micron ram into the pc with the GF3 and got a LOT of errors, random freezes, and blue screens both in and out of games... I pull out one stick and reboot and all is well... after adding and removing the stick (which I had ordered separately), I come to the conclusion that the stick is bad... just for kicks I install those same 3 sticks into the other pc, also with a 1.2 Tbird but with a GF2 card, and NO problems... the system runs great...

Has anyone heard of any issues with more than 512mb ram with GF3 cards causing Win2k to go all flibbidy-flobbady?

Keep in mind that both systems are practically identical (well, not anymore since the A7V with bios 1007 died last night)... both systems WILL have the same sound card (SB Live), same NIC (Netgear 311), mobo (A7V), and cpu (1.2/200 Tbird)... the ONLY difference is the video card...

Thanks in advance...

Yes, I've had the same problem. If you place that "bad"
stick in the third slot, you might not get errors because
it's memory hasn't been accessed. Try opening a bunch
of programs or do memory intensive use and see if you
get the errors.
You can also use the memory check feature of Norton
Utilities to check each stick of memory.

Bottom line, my stick of memory was bad.

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Serious Soldier

i have heard that the mem check in norton does not work with all brands, i know that it works with pc 100 of one brand but ont on pc 133 of the same brand

you might take this in to thought also

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~Jon~
if you have to stop and wonder then you have already lost

errmmm
not familiar with that bug

but I'm also not used to people with more than 256 to 512 RAM either.... why you need so much?

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HAHAHA, Work's fun.
Then you put in 65 hours in 5 days. What the hell was I thinking?

Don't use Norton's to test RAM. It's useless for more than one stick. It ALWAYS reports bad RAM.

As for the problem with three sticks in an Asus A7V.... it's a COMMON problem, well documented and with NO FIX (that I find reasonable).

Take the following "explination" of the problem from Mushkin's website. I couldn't have phrased it better myself. Now take the scenario the folks at Mushkin are putting into wods and crank it up to the 10th power because it's an Asus A7V and this is a characteristic of the board:

Unregistered SDRAM limits the maximum frequency you can run SDRAM reliably with out having to introduce latencies, the reason is that more chips connected to the memory bus the greater the capacitance load.
Higher capacitance loads require more current to drive the signals to the valid voltage levels. So for the best memory bus performance, the less DIMMS the better (we've seen numerous examples of this, where a board will run stable with one DIMM, but lose stability once more DIMMs are added). Of course, less memory may result in better ?benchmark performance? for your memory subsystem, but if you don't have enough memory for your applications then there will be an even bigger performance hit on the performance of your whole system than just running your memory at CAS 3.
So if you need more and better memory performance it?s best to select a DIMM with the highest memory density supported by your motherboard's chipset (check your motherboard manual). This results in less chips connected to the memory bus, therefore your memory bus will see less capacitance load.

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Hey. What kind of party is this? There's no booze and only one hooker. -- Bender (Futurama)

Yeah, according to information on Asus's website, their recommended fix is to simply *not use* the third DIMM slot. What kind of crap is that?

__________________
"And knowing is half the battle!"

I use it quite often with more than one stick and never get errors unless it is bad ram. Guess I must be lucky.

Yeah, ASUS kinda messed up on that one, don't use the 3rd slot.


But all in all, ASUS is a good motherboard.

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Serious Soldier

You've use it with more than one stick of SDRAM over 128MB and not had it report bad RAM on you???

you sir, ARE GOD!!!!

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Hey. What kind of party is this? There's no booze and only one hooker. -- Bender (Futurama)

Using Norton Utilities 2001 on the above ASUS board
I had sticks of 128 meg PC133 memory. VCM kind.

When I filled all three slots I got an error on the third stick.
I removed the third stick and retested. No errrors.

I removed Stick 2 and placed stick 3 in that slot.
Retest showed an error.
I took the memory to a memory testing store and he confirmed
that it was bad.

For the fun of it, I went back home and placed 3 new sticks
in all slots. Tested and got an error on the 3 stick.
Removed the third stick and tested, ok.

repleated above procedure using two slots and all sticks were fine. Went to the ASUS site under FAQ and found that ASUS
said not to use the 3rd slot. Dool....What a bummer.

I use NU 2001 on all my systems and occasionally test the memory but have never had an error exspect the above stiuation.

Guess I'm lucky.

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Serious Soldier

I have used my A7V for 6 months now with all 3 dimm slots used. I have 1 256mb dimm and 2 128 mb dimms. I over clocked my T-bird from 750 to 850 using 1.75 v core. I only get problems with Counter-strike in windows 2000 locking up once in awile.

Am I just lucky??

What video card?

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Hey. What kind of party is this? There's no booze and only one hooker. -- Bender (Futurama)

pull the last 128MB stick and see what happens then in CS

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HAHAHA, Work's fun.
Then you put in 65 hours in 5 days. What the hell was I thinking?

He he..... Yeah. I wonder if it would start working then.

Actually, I found something the other day. The third slot is not completely useless. The board is just way picky.

I had three sticks of 128MB RAM with Micron chips on 6 layer PCB and it wouldn't work in the A7V133. I switched those three sticks for three sticks of the same thing Micron chips on 6 layer PCB, etc), only the PCB was "Powmem" brand, and it worked fine!!! Go figure!

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Hey. What kind of party is this? There's no booze and only one hooker. -- Bender (Futurama)