Friend has a RAM issue!

[acidrain]

Hi guys,

Well i have a friend who asked me about a problem he is having with his mobo and ram. Apparently when he did a recent BIOS update, he is only now able to use one of his two RAM chips. Its an MSI board ( specifically i dont know ), and the ram chips are 1GB and 512Gb respectively. I told him its never good to stick two different sized ram chips in his mobo and rather keep it either 512/512 or 1024/1024. He has checked each module by taking out one and sticking the other in and booting up.

The pc will boot up with either two in on its own but wont when both chips are in. When he does stick both in and boot up, he said that he gets some sort of "CMOS" error. He further looked for assistance and in most cases he was told to set the mobo jumper settings to "reset cmos" and take out the battery for an hour or so and then replace it. This hasn't helped him thus far so can anyone else think of what the problem could be and how to fix it.

I told him to try rollback to the old bios version but he has forgotten what version it was and therefore cannot retrieve it.

Thanks again in advance

 

[acidrain]

Well what would you know, i have stumped the pc guru's out there !

 

[Threepwood]

Sometimes when a mobo has four slots the RAM sticks need to be in a specific arrangement, perhaps like so, the 1 lines represent a ram stick, the 0 an empty slot:

0 1 0 1
0 1 0 1
0 1 0 1
0 1 0 1

Try moving them around in different configurations. Also, some Mobo's don't support double-sided modules and things like that. Check the manufaturer's web page for information regarding the specific board.

 

[cyberarmy]

I will also suggest change the arrangement of RAM, since I used to have similar problem with my ASUS MB and some cheap Ram from Singapore (NCP), and change slot helped to stablelized the problem.

Also ask your friend to downgrade its BIOS back to previous version which there's no problem, if he wasn't updating the BIOS to sort out some other problem he had with the MB. Sometimes it's not the newer the better.

 

[acidrain]

I will also suggest change the arrangement of RAM...
Also ask your friend to downgrade its BIOS back to previous version which there's no problem, if he wasn't updating the BIOS to sort out some other problem he had with the MB. Sometimes it's not the newer the better.

OK, changing arrangements aint gonna work, its a cheap mobo so only has 2 ram slots and downgrading the bios ( i told him he should do this but has forgotten what version he upgraded from therefore unable to recall which version worked.

Everything worked before the bios update, after that it when banana's.

 

[Gnome]

Mixing different memory sized chips/brands/chip types are always bad, nothing will help except to downgrade on the BIOS, optionally he can try setting the RAM timing settings manually in the BIOS as it appears on the slowest chip's SPD.

Could also be that if the motherboard supports dual channel it's attempting to run dual channel and the chips being different will most likely cause issue's.