Booting the Core 2 era board

[mackerel]

Randomly decided to tinker with this today. Had trouble getting it to boot at first. Found it only boots reliably with the single stick of 1GB 800 ram in. The two sticks that were in the other channel were 512MB 667. With them in, it currently POSTs then freezes. I know it worked before but no amount of re-seating is helping. The ram in the bag is 533 speed. I need to check again but I don't think the mobo goes that low. It only has two supported speeds.

Got the SSD to boot. It has Win10 on it, so it is not the Win7 install that I used with this mobo. I'm looking at if I can salvage the install to save doing a new one.

1GB of ram running Win10 is as fun as you can imagine. I might try my luck with the other sticks regardless. Minimum requirement according to MS is 2GB for x64 version.

 

[JLK03F150]

Have you tried canned air in the RAM slots & a pencil eraser on the RAM contact edges?

What CPU is under the cooler? A 333MHz FSB CPU won't work with the 533MHz RAM, but a 200-266MHz FSB CPU should work.

 

[mackerel]

It is a Core 2 Duo E6400. Mobo only shows support for 667 and 800 ram. I can't even remember what ram was around at that time. Too long ago.

By moving sticks around I got it booted with 0/1G/512M/512M.

The Windows 10 install looks like it is the old SSD from a laptop I have before I replaced it with a bigger one. It seems to be functional and remained activated so I'm letting it update at the moment. I thought ram would be the limit but it seems those CPU cores are rather slow by modern standards and it is 100% most of the time.

 

[JLK03F150]

I can't imagine the board doesn't have a 1:1 memory ratio, which would work with your E6400. Glad you at least got 2GB working, even if it is single channel.

 

[Kenrou]

Google-Fu

"It will depend on what motherboard you have. If it has 2 slots of DDR2 it can only support up to 4GB of RAM. If it has 2 Slots of DDR3 it may have up to 16GB of RAM. But it will also depend on your motherboard chipset. If based on a popular chipset on Core 2 duo, the G41 chipset, it can support up to 16GB DDR3 RAM."

Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 Specs

Conroe, 2 Cores, 2 Threads, 2.133 GHz, 65 W

www.techpowerup.com

 

[mackerel]

I can't imagine the board doesn't have a 1:1 memory ratio, which would work with your E6400. Glad you at least got 2GB working, even if it is single channel.

It has 3 settings under ram: Auto, 667, 800. Auto doesn't get it running any lower. Or does it? I'll double check in a bit. I think it is on Auto now, but I have mixed ram in with 667 being slowest. I'll try the 533 sticks.

BTW it is dual channel. There's 1GB total per channel.

"It will depend on what motherboard you have.

DDR2 implied from speeds earlier. The chipset is responsible in this era.

 

[infinitevalence]

lol, I finally decommissioned my Q6600 a few years ago after it was clear that it simply had no use even as a server or router. Oldest stuff I have still in operation is an i5-4970k that one of my kids uses for minecraft.

 

[Nebulous]

I remember upgrading from a 4970K to a 7700K. The 4970K combo wasn't worth much, so I gave it away. Was one helluva rig in it's day.

 

[mackerel]

I don't know if I'll have a use for this again ever, but while I still have it, might as well keep it going. Think last time I used it was for some hwbot contest submission.

 

[dfonda]

Gotta love hoarding Had at least 2 Asrock with that CPU before Bigadv. and a 4 CPU server board replaced them (F@H). I think I took them to recycling 10 years ago.

Post magically merged: Feb 7, 2024

I remember upgrading from a 4970K to a 7700K. The 4970K combo wasn't worth much, so I gave it away. Was one helluva rig in it's day.

Still have a 4690K running. 10 years its been running nearly 24/7 F@H...

 

[don256us]

I skimmed this thread.
1) Good stuff. Old hardware can be fun.

2) As I recall, when using RAM of different speed, you want the lower speed in the "main" slot. The rest will take the queue from the first slot. If the 800 is in the main slot, it will try to make the 667 go @ 800 and vice versa. You can usually get away with making the 800 go @ 667 but have problems the other way round.

3) A board like this would work great as a server. I like Unraid for using old hard drives to store my media. You could also do a squid server (to preload web pages, was fun when we had dial-up and slower DSL) proxy server or whatever tickles your fancy.

 

[mackerel]

Didn't know about the ram thing. I kinda hoped the mobo would read the SPD on all modules and work it out from there. I can certainly see a basic implementation looking at one and going with it.

Interesting point about using it for unraid. I'm currently using a 5775C system for that. The gaming testing from another thread is postponed indefinitely as I have a lot going on right now. Freeing up the 5775C would be nice to enable it to be used. My unraid usage is pure file storage. No docker or other server stuff so CPU/ram requirements are pretty basic.

 

[don256us]

Didn't know about the ram thing. I kinda hoped the mobo would read the SPD on all modules and work it out from there. I can certainly see a basic implementation looking at one and going with it.

Interesting point about using it for unraid. I'm currently using a 5775C system for that. The gaming testing from another thread is postponed indefinitely as I have a lot going on right now. Freeing up the 5775C would be nice to enable it to be used. My unraid usage is pure file storage. No docker or other server stuff so CPU/ram requirements are pretty basic.

Defiantly not reading each stick of RAM so this may end up helping out. The nice thing about Unraid since the last few iterations is that Unraid keeps track of the HDD/SSD serial numbers and will pick up from where it left off if you swap the CPU/Mobo. Easy peasy.