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I did a very VERY stupid thing, is the RAM dead?

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Sleepy_Steve

Member
Joined
Dec 3, 2004
Location
VT... or MD
So, um, yeah, did you ever find out that the max on your CPU is about 3.5, but it sends very odd / bad voltage spikes after like 15 min? Well I saw this and immediately de-clocked back to stock settings, and then back up to 3.2 on a 1:1 ratio where I knew there to be no problems. (It was at 5:4 for seeing how far the CPU could go)

Problem is that I’m running value select, and I was thinking that if I couldn’t have really fast clock speed, I would try to shorten my memory timings. That was apparently very stupid of me.

Well anyway, I dropped the ram from 2.5 7 3 3 (I’m guessing that was the limit) to 2.5 7 2 2. Hit F10 then ENTER, and got a continual tone out of the sys speaker that repeats every few secs... its hard for me to tell, the tornado just about drowns it out. So I guess I need to know if the ram is still good, how to reset the settings back to default so that it can boot again, and all of that stuff. I know I screwed my sys big time, and that is why I have two backups in this room alone.
 
Ram just doesnt like the timings, take the cmos battery out for a few mins then put it back in your pc will boot full stock bios settings
 
Ahh, that's no big deal. You just have your settings up too high. All you need to do is reset your CMOS. Try holding insert and pressing the power button. That might be able to boot your computer into a "bios safe mode" where you can adjust your settings back to something reasonable, and save. If that doesn't work you will need to follow the instructions in your motherboard manual to reset your CMOS with a jumper. That will clear all the settings in your bios, so you will have to put everything back where you had it before.

*Edit*
You can also remove the CMOS battery and put it back in like JimBob said. I would try the other two methods first though. The battery is my last resort.
 
Your RAM should be O.K. Test by switching back to stock settings.
Although I run an A64 based system (see sig) I've faced a similar issue and it is but a minor glitch which is quite harmless. If your BIOS doesn't automatically allow you to revert back to stock settings, try resetting the CMOS by removing the CMOS battery, resetting the CMOS clear jumper (see your manual) and waiting for about 2 minutes before you reinsert the battery and reset the jumper.
 
ok, i was afraid it died on me. its releaving to see that its rather common with an easy fix. on the bright side, i know how fast to set my ram :D

thanks for the quick replys, ill fix it in the morning, or after school, depends on how quick i can wake up in the morning tho.

*Edit* oh, just clarifying, i will need to set the raid up again, along with everything else right? so it will have the factory defaults or fail-safe defaults loaded after i do this, right? also, do those affect HDD recognition?
 
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it resets everything in the bios... so anything you had changed in the bios will need to be changed back *loves the asus thing that lets you go into bios at default, change sutff and then reboot to settings you had before+changed stuff*
 
Yeah, there was a time when I was resetting the bios weekly to correct for mistakes. I usually go for the battery
 
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