Bad memory controller on Opty 170?

I'm confused.. my old memory (in my sig under current rig) wouldn't work unless I had loose timings and only worked up until 220mhz ish. This is 2 x 512 sticks.

Now I upgraded to 2gb, I got the GSkill 2GBHZ kit (DDR500 3-4-4-8 rated) and it won't even load windows at 200mhz (no matter what the processor speed it) and my best luck was having the cpu oc'd a little and having a divider on the ram to keep it in the 190's 3-4-4-8.

the funny thing is that the ram passes memtest at stock speeds.

so.. could this be the cpu's memory controller that's bad? Reason I'm thinking it could be it as opposed to the ram being so bad is that memtest passes, and my old ram worked much better in my old rig, and now the controller is asked to handle twice the memory therefore crapping out at slower speeds..

I've got the corsair value 512x2 kit too.

It seems okay as long as i use dividers to keep it @ or below 200. I've got an evga mobo nf41. My 170 will do about 2400 before I'm unstable (default volts...prolly should bump it a little). Mine passes 10 loops of mem test and prime on both cores without problems, but something isn't stable as HL2 crashes with in 15 mins.

are you running t1 ? I'd be surprised if the mem controler is faulty.

I had all kinds of issues with the same kind of ram and a DFI NF4 Infinity. It would pass Memtest all the way up to 275mhz (last speed I tested) but things were flakey at default speeds and forget anything above 220. That was at the rated 3.4.4.8. with a 165 Opty. I swapped out the G.Skill for some Adata Hyperram sticks (2x512) and things at least got stable enough to use (still had issues, but at least things worked most of the time) until a new Asus A8N-SLI Premium arrived. Now the G.Skill is quite happy with the Opty and it is at 250mhz 1:1 at default voltages.
I would guess it is more an issue with the DFI board than the Opty.

i just ordered that room too.........

hmmmm I think I solved the problem, i put the ram sticks into the orange slots (#3 and #4) and played with Drive Strength, at setting 08 it seems to be stable now (266mhz 3-4-4-8)

cpu seems to be perfectly fine!!

Nice WTG. I just got my Gskill DDR550's so maybe this will be helpful to me.

i had a problem kinda like that with my ram so i just set it to 2.80v and it's perfectly stable, now