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ASUS P4C800 anyone?

by @ 5:10 pm on 12/21/2005. Filed under tech

Do you have an ASUS P4C800 motherboard?

Does it have more 3GB or more of RAM installed?

Does it POST more than 2943MB? Email me or please comment. If you have that configuration and you noticed it didn’t POST the RAM properly either also email or comment.

When I bought memory for my new laptop I also bought memory for a couple of my desktop machines. I have been working on getting the memory installed and after a week+ of trying including bringing my MOBO up to the latest rev from ASUS I am still not able to get the machine to POST more than 2943MB. I have actually found a couple of folks on the internet who appear to have the same issues with the same numbers but with different memory.

When I first installed the 4x1GB of RAM (approved by Corsair for this MOBO – VS1GB400C3) I POSTed only about 2300MB of RAM. I upgraded to 2011 BIOS and it POSTed to 2700MB. Then I downloaded from the ASUS website the 2019.002 update which for some reason wasn’t available through the BIOS update tool you get with the Mobo. Once I installed that BIOS I detected 2943MB in the POST with the last 50 or so MB being detected VERY slowly. I realize that I will never see 4096 POST due to the ICH5 stuff, but I should at least be seeing 3500MB and the POSTed values should be different whether I install 3GB or 4GB as I indicate below.

I bought 8 1GB chips so I cycled through all of them and they all showed the same results in any combination of 4x1GB in any combination of the 4 slots. So then I backed up and put in 3GB, first by 3x1GB and then 2x1GB + 2x512MB. Interestingly enough, both also POSTed to 2943MB… 3GB shouldn’t be impacted by ICH5 at all according to what I have read so I would expect 3072 POSTed…. I again went through multple combinations with the 8 1GB and 4 512MB chips I had available.

When I first contacted ASUS I was told the issue was due to ICH5 PCI allocation. I found that to be a bit silly because of the results of the tests above and figured someone just didn’t read what I wrote so I submitted another ticket. The response to that came back that possibly the memory isn’t compatible, is bad, or had the wrong latency settings. The memory is compatible according to ASUS, no issues appear unless I hit 3GB or bigger. The latency settings tend to control hanging, not how much is detected but I doublechecked and then hard set 3-3-3-8 which is supported by the MOBO and specified for these chips. Still nothing.

When I check with the Microsoft Memory Test, it shows 4×1024 in the slots. CPU-Z says the same. memtest-86 tells me I have 2942MB but that is what POST is saying so I don’t expect it is actually looking, it is asking the BIOS.

I have posted something to the Corsair forums hoping to get a response there.

Personally I am starting to think that this MOBO doesn’t really support 4GB although ASUS says it does.

joe

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