Problems with RAM upgrade/Motherboard

[Kalros]

Hey all. I'm to the point now where I'm ready to take my team of 5 into Northrend, so I figured I had better bump my system up to 8GB of RAM from 4GB.

Well, I'm having some issues. My motherboard, MSI P45 Platinum, is supposed to support up to 16GB of DDR2, but I cannot get it to accept more than 4GB. I now have multiple 2GB sticks, and it has 4 total slots, but whenever I put in more than 4GB, it wont boot up. It will beep a couple times, and restart itself. I'll never see the POST/BIOS screens at all.

I went through all the BIOS settings that I was sure about, and nothing seems to help. The computer will only take a matched pair in slots 1 and 3, or 2 and 4. I've tried multiple brands/speeds of RAM with the exact same results.

So is my MB screwed, or am I just missing something here?

[Vmpwraith]

Try to use two matched Ram chips and reset bios if you can get to the bios screen. You could always try adding just one chip to slot 1 to see if you can get the bios back. Is the ram all of the same speed ? 800, 667 1033 or are you trying to use different speed ram together?

What Operating system are you using? If its no Vista/Xp 64 it wont recognize your extra ram above 4gig.

[Sam DeathWalker]

set timeings to 5-5-5-15-42-2t see if that works.

double check your two sticks are in the right slots, seems that putting both in the same color sometimes isnt right ...

[moosejaw]

The application CPU-Z will tell you good basic ram timings for your ram. Some ram may need 'loose' timings.

On to your problem. When you populate all 4 ram slots the memory controller is really taxed. Your ram voltage may need to be bumped up as high as 2.2V to get the machine to post. Raise the voltage slowly (starting from 1.8V) until it posts then run memtest from cd to check if the timings/voltages are good. Rinse and repeat untill memtest is good then boot up and double check the reported timings in cpu-z. Now run some prime95 stress tests to verify everything is stable.

[Kicksome]

Check to make sure both sets of memory work in slots 1 and 3. Also, like moosejaw said, some motherboard don't properly recognize the memory voltage, so you might have to bum it up manually to 2.0v, but check out the ram package, it should say. If they do, then it's probably a motherboard issue.

Maybe it's bad ram, I haven't seen many motherboards where one of the rams slots is bad, but I'm sure it can happen.

[Kalros]

Ok, making some progress! Thanks for all the inputs, everyone.

Turns out it was one set of the RAM. Its weird though, the set (2x 2GB sticks) work fine by themselves, in any slots, but when you pair them up with anything else, the computer wont boot, so I got 4 sticks of 2 other brands, put them together and it worked fine, but any time I put anything else with those original two sticks (some crappy brand called PJ that came with my desktop), it would crap out.

So now my next question is this:

-Is there one version of Vista 64-bit that is better for multiboxers over another? I was probably just going to do the Home Premium 64-bit version of Vista.

[moosejaw]

Nothing special for vista versions. The higher versions have more frills (ultimate,premium) like media center and advanced networking options for business. Just buy the cheapest you can find.

[confusedtx5]

Xp 64bit is better than any Vista flavours, or if you're the tinkering type, you could try for win7 RC