GA-970A-UD3P RAM issues

[shure]

Motherboard: GA-970A-UD3P rev 2.0
CPU: AMD Athlon II X2 260
Graphics: ATI AMD Radeon HD 5670 1GB
PSU: 750W
RAM: 4GB DDR3 PC3-12800 1600Mhz (maximum)
OS: Windows 7 64Bit SP1

Issue:
I recently bought this board to replace an Asus which was playing up.  Trouble is, no matter what I do I can't get it to work with more than 4GB RAM.  It works fine with 2x2GB DDR3 1333Mhz RAM.  It works fine with 1x 4GB DDR3 1600Mhz.  But It won't work with 2x4GB DDR3 1600Mhz.  I have tried my original Crucial DIMMs and have also exchanged them for another identical set.  I have swapped them with 2 x Patriot Viper 3 Venom Red 4GB 1600Mhz, which have been working perfectly for the last two years in an Intel rig, but again it will only work with a single DIMM.  I have reset the BIOS, updated to the latest version and tried setting to XMP Profile 1, to no avail.

It's not an AMD limitation, as my previous AMD motherboard accepted the 1600Mhz RAM without any issues for three years.  It seems to be very specific to this Gigabyte board and the excitement I felt after buying it is rapidly wearing off.  What can I do to make it accept more than 4GB without causing the system to crash?    A 4GB limitation makes the board worthless to me.

[shadowsports]

Try setting the memory configuration manually for the DIMMs you are installing.

[shure]

Hi,

thanks for the reply and suggestion.  The settings do show up correctly in the BIOS.  The computer boots to Windows OK, but shortly after either freezes or reboots.  It's not consistent with any action I'm doing, either.  Sometimes it will idle fine for several minutes, other times it will freeze as soon as I open a web page.  With just 4GB it's utterly reliable.

[dmdilks]

All boards are not the same. When you say all the setting all OK. Speed and timings? The CPU will only support up 1333 memory. Yes you can run higher memory but on a Gigabyte board you might have to OC your CPU a little to get them to work.

I have see on some of these boards you can't use the profile for your memory. Set them manually in the bios. Just make sure you have the speed and timings set to the memory spec.

[shure]

thanks for the suggestion.  My RAM is Crucial 1600 running at 11-11-11-28.  What would be the recommended settings for it at 1333?

[dmdilks]

Set the speed at 1600 and then make sure you timings are at 11-11-11-28. Then see what happens. If you still problems try it at default setting what the mother board sets it at.

[shure]

the motherboard does provide those settings as default, but still crashes