Hey Everyone.
Here is the deal. I have been trying for days now to get this box stable. Memory is off the QVL. Problem is that I get random BSOD and memtestx86+ always seems to fail around step 5 or 6. I am not trying to overclock this box. I would even have it run a bit slower as long as it was stable.
Per Gigabyte's direction, I manually entered the timings: 8-8-8-21 and the voltage of 1.5. This did not fix the issue. I then flashed to bios F6 and still no change.
I then did one stick at a time and there were NO errors on any of the sticks. I think the error is the fact that when I am in dual channel mode with ALL slots full, there is a voltage drop at boot or at some point in the booting process. Single channel has no issues.
I have four 2G sticks for a total of 8GB of ram. This means all the memory slots are full. Because each stick passes, gskill says no issue. Because I have the settings in the box as I do, Gigabyte says it should work. So i'm stuck in the circle apparently many have been in.
Aside from this, I was also upgrading the RAM in my Asus P5Q SE Plus (totally separate box) with a quad core. On this board the North Bridge is a MB component (socket 775) BUT I had the EXACT same issues as I do with the Gigabyte board.
The Asus forum directed me to update my voltage on the North Bridge from <Auto> to a hard 1.40V. The box instantly came to life, passed all memory tests and has been stable since. I went to apply the logic to the Gigabyte board only to find that there isn't a setting for the north bridge as its part of the CPU itself.
The latest test was enabling the XMS profile for memory. I still got errors in memtest. Does anyone know of settings that should be manually entered to get a stable box? I saw a lot of talk about the QPI(vtt), blck, vcore, vdroop, line conditioning, and other settings but they all seem to be applied when you are trying to OC the board. I just want it stable.
This is my first I7-860 build and it has basically fought me the whole way. I am guessing that others on the forum are quite skilled and make take for granted that I would know the most basic settings. Please, if giving the settings, be literal and assume I know nothing about it. I want to be sure that every detail is covered.
Below is the hardware in question.
GA-P55A-UD3 bios ver. F6
Intel Core i7-860 Lynnfield 2.8GHz LGA 1156 95W Quad-Core Processor
TWO G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model F3-10666CL8D-4GBHK
Speed DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666)
Cas Latency 8
Timing 8-8-8-21
Voltage 1.5V
ECC No
Buffered/Registered Unbuffered
Multi-channel Kit Dual Channel Kit
Antec EarthWatts EA650 650W Continuous Power ATX12V Ver.2.2 / EPS12V version 2.91 SLI Certified CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS
650W Continuous Power
HIS H467QS1GH Radeon HD 4670 1GB 128-bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Car
TWO Cavier Black HDD (SATA)
TWO DVD-RW (SATA)
