Memory upgrade problem - Need help with timings

[Konstantin]

Hi folks!

I decided recently to upgrade my PC with 1 GB of memory, because my Windows always swapped a lot and it become very slow when I start a lot of (but needed) applications. I have a rather old PC: Intel D865PERL mainboard, 2.4 GHz processor (no celeron), and 3 pieces of DDR 400 MHz RAM modules: 2*512 MB PQI, 1*256 MB Samsung. With the abovementioned three RAM modules my PC works fine, no crashes/freezes, but 1.2 GB memory is still less than enough.

Finally I managed to buy an 1 GB KingMax modul. My PC starts well, but unfortunately after a while it freezes and/or reboots.

I hope that I can fix this problem by setting up proper timing data in the BIOS or with the application called MemSet. I used the "decode-dimms.pl" utility in Linux to get data about the supported timings of my modules, it gave me these results (tCL-tRCD-tRP-tRAS)

1. 512 MB PQI modul: 2.5-4-4-8

2. 512 MB PQI modul: 3-3-3-8
(but it also supports CAS Latencies, in the first position: 3, 2.5, 2)

3. 256 MB Samsung modul: 2.5-4-4-8

4. 1 GB KingMax modul: 3-4-4-8

With the MemSet utility ( http://www.tweakers.fr/memset.html ) I realized, that my modules are running with: 2.5-4-4-7 timings, but I have permanent crashes/reboots/freezes.

My question: what timings should I set up to stabilize my PC? Maybe I should omit one of the 3 old modules?

 

[johan851]

I might omit the 256mb module - it's not adding a lot of total memory and lots of different modules certainly don't help stability.

That's a wide range of timings you have there. For stability, you need to set your timings to essentially the worst common denominator, which in this case is 3-4-4-8. 2.5-4-4-7 is too tight for the 3-4-4-8 modules and will likely make them unstable.

Try memset with 3-4-4-8 first and see how it goes. You can run Prime95 for stability. If that doesn't work, I'd take out the 256mb module and try again.

 

[EarthDog]

Run P95 BLEND for stability testing of more memory.