2100 Tbred B Good, Memory Bad

First let me say that this forum totally rocks! I've only been on for a few days and there are some awesome threads on here.

Here's the good news - my 2100 Tbred B from Newegg hits 2300MHz 177x13 at 1.85 (maybe lower V, but haven't tried yet). I'm running an SLK 800 with a 40 CFM fan (H20 system on it's way!)

Now the bad news - my Corsair XMS 2700 sticks can't handle this speed! Here's how I tested running Prime95:

1) I have two 256MB sticks on a Epox 8K3A+ board. The highest I was able to run was 175 at "Safe" timing settings. This is also at 2.7V.

2) When I remove one stick, I can run at 177 "Turbo" settings at 2.7V. I may be able to go higher, but haven't tried.

So here's my dilemma. I think the Corsair stick are pretty decent, but my board can't handle the loading of 2 sticks. I shelled out $200 for these so I think I have two options:

A) Keep one stick and sell the other and give myself some cash. What's the performance difference in Win2K with 256 vs. 512?

B) Sell both sticks and buy a single 512MB 3500 stick. Maybe my net spending is $50 or less.

Any suggestions or other options?

Not sure about the 2 sticks of ram giving you problems. I have the same board (8K3A+ Rev 1.2) with 1 stick of corsair PC3200PT 512Mb Cas2 @ Turbo settings with 2.9v Running a Tbred AIUGA 1800+ @ 11x201=2214Mhz Solid @ 2v core.

My suggestion: Sell both sticks and get 1- 512mb stick of either PC3200 or 3500

You'll yield better results with one 512 stick than with 2 256 sticks of ram.

If you would've had an nf2 board, you'd prolly would've had a better chance at higher fsb and utilized the dual DDR.

Question: What bios are you using?

Well,

That was kind of my plan to get a dual channel DDR board, but I bought an H20 system instead and decided to keep my Epox. My BIOS is the latest B01 November 02. BTW, the latest XP speed that registers on the BIOS is 2700+ which is actually 2166 MHz. At my 2300 MHz speed the display only says "Athlon XP at 2300 MHz".

I'm also worried about data integrity and running my 166 sticks at 177+. Since these are non-ECC, my system can get royally screwed up depending on what file gets corrupt.

This already happened to me once during testing and I was lucky it was my boot.ini file which autmatically saves the last known good config.

Darn, this dimm loading problem really blows. Maybe I just run at 166 and call it a day. I believe my Tbred B is unlocked, but I can't run it at 14x. The system refuses to boot. Maybe I'll research this further since I need more cpu speed rather than memory speed.

Cheers,

Guess what?

I put the two sticks back and simply re-arrange to slots 1 & 2 and now it works at 177! Even at 2.6V!

I had originally thought the routing from the Northbridge to the sockets started at socket 2 and branched out to sockets 1 & 3 from the middle socket. At least that's the way I would have done it to keep the trace lengths equal on all the sockets.

Therefore, my original placement of the sticks was sockets 1 & 3. I figured this was the most balanced loading/impedence. I guess my intuition was wrong.

Hope this helps anyone else that has a similar problem. Now it's time to run Prime95 for a couple days just to be sure. I may have to tweak the voltage a bit, but this is way better than before.