Odd experience with memory divider

[trents]

I put 2x4gb sticks of Muskin Silverline DDR3 1333 in an ASRock 970M Pro motherboard this week. CPU was a Athlon II Propus core 630.

I overclocked it to 3.5 on 250 mhz bus.

The odd thing was I could not set the RAM divider in bios to the 1066 frequency to get the RAM to run the full 1333 mhz rated speed. It would allow me to set it to the 800 mhz divider for to give a result of 1000 mhz and it would also allow me to set it to 1333 which yielded 1600 mhz RAM frequency (unstable of course) on a 250 mhz FSB. When I swapped in a pair of GSKILL DDR3 1600 sticks I could then set the RAM bus to 1066 to get a resulting 1333 mhz for the RAM on the 250 mhz FSB.

If I left the FSB at the stock 200 then it would allow me to set the Muskin Silverline at 1333.

Is this a problem with the Mushkin RAM or some quirky thing from a combination of the Mushkin RAM and the bios?

 

[EarthDog]

Amd isn't my thing...but the first thing I would try is to make sure your boards bios is up to date.

 

[Johan45]

Just curious if the board had G.skill in it previously and then you put the mushkin in. Did you clr the CMOS ?

 

[trents]

Yes, the board did have the GSkill 1600 in it previously I believe. I was using it as a test board. Not sure if I cleared the CMOS or not but I'm thinking I did at one point. Good thought.

Not sure if it has the latest bios either.

 

[Woomack]

In both cases you should have available all dividers but some may not work when you leave timings at auto or set too high FSB/HTT. Some combinations are also not working with higher density memory and it's something about CPU microcode as I had problems with new 4/8GB modules based on Micron IC on ASUS 990FX board too.
You can update BIOS or check different memory slots. Not much more can do with this issue.

 

[trents]

In both cases you should have available all dividers but some may not work when you leave timings at auto or set too high FSB/HTT. Some combinations are also not working with higher density memory and it's something about CPU microcode as I had problems with new 4/8GB modules based on Micron IC on ASUS 990FX board too.
You can update BIOS or check different memory slots. Not much more can do with this issue.

I did try to set the timings manually but didn't help. And these are not high density modules. I think you might be correct about the IC. Not sure what Mushkin used for that but it does seem to be some kind of quirk compatibility issue at that divider point. Oh, well, I put the GSKill 1600s back in and the problem is gone. I put the Mushkins in an HTPC cube with running the RAM at 1400 mhz and they seem to be happy there.