Thought i'd give you a little update on my SLI memory issue. Firstly a big thanks to RyderOCZ who did try to help and arranged my RMA. +1 rep
It's got me beat LMAO i've given up. Sent off my 2 old sticks and 2 weeks later (good old royal mail
) I received a UPS package from OCZ holland.
Tore the package open and dashed to the pc room, whipped the side off my case and installed the 2 new sticks...beeeeeeeeep...bugger
.
Took out the old RAM sticks and booted into windows with just the new ones, saved a copy of the new SPD and compared it to the set I bought in April, 2 or 3 differences including voltage (1.9v and 2.1v on epp) and Trc (19 on the RMA set and 22 on Aprils set). This rules out the board detecting it as SLI. Don't think it'll make that much of a difference and it's probably unrelated but the sticks my wife bought me in April are on a black PCB and the set I had returned from RMA are on green PCB's (the same colour as the set I sent in but with a different holographic sticker).
Tried flashing the spd's so they are all identical using 3 different SPD's (old 1066, april 1066 and the RMA 1066 spd), each time I so much as looked at the SLI option in my bios I get a massive beeeeep and it freezes at DET RAM on my fault module. Can't set it manually either without getting the same error. Obviously the chips have different requirements to run.
I don't blame OCZ, I guess it's just one of those things. I should have invested in 4gb from the off, trying to match 2 packs of RAM bought at separate times has just resulted in me getting a bit of a headache.
Just in case anyones curious I did ring my friend Pete who was good enough to bring over his 4x1gb sticks of OCZ 1066 memory (which ironically I ordered for his build in February) to see if it was a board issue but it booted and ran fine, unfortunately I was unable to switch them without him noticing
.
Can't be bothered with the whole RMA process again with no guarantee of sucess so I guess for now i'm confined to 667mhz..........until I manage to save up.
So much for the following blurb quoted from the nvidia site:
Certified SLI-Ready Memory
NVIDIA SLI-Ready system memory certification ensures compatibility and system stability with the rest of the SLI ecosystem components including NVIDIA nForce SLI motherboards, NVIDIA GeForce GPUs, and SLI-Ready power supplies. SLI-Ready memory also supports Enhanced Performance Profiles (EPP) 1.0 and 2.0. When paired with a compatible NVIDIA nForce 790i, 780i, 680i SLI, 680i LT SLI or 590 SLI AMD edition-based motherboards, SLI-Ready memory exposes advanced performance memory settings.
Only memory that pass NVIDIA SLI certification can be called "NVIDIA SLI-Ready certified." Be sure to look for the NVIDIA SLI-Ready badge when you buy your system memory.
Recently posted a topic asking what case I should get for my birthday. Well in the end common sense took hold and I realised I was changing for changes sake.
So instead I invested my money in a high interest savings account................yeah right!
Being unimpressed with the feeble heatpipe cooling solution on my budget asus P5N32-E SLI Plus motherboard I decided to take a trip to my local hardware store (just to look of course, I mean really it's always just to look isn't it).
30 minutes later I left carrying a number of varying size boxes. The list comprised of:
Asus Striker II Formula motherboard
A further 2gb of OCZ PC8500 Nvidia SLI RAM
Windows Vista Home premium 64
750GB Samsung Spinpoint F1 HDD
Now the hard bit, I had to hand them to my wife so she could wrap them up for my birthday. 8 days I waited all the time knowing what lay at the bottom of the wardrobe (in amongst numerous shoes - unworn and bags - uncarried, women sheesh).
Finally the big day came and with a shudder at the thought of turning 30 I set about opening my new toys. After fully cleaning out my case I set about building monster rig mk2. Setting aside the boring build stuff lets jump straight into the pictures before I add one or two more notes at the end.
Out with the old.....
In with the new......
A few notes:
I can finally touch the heatpiped chipsets, something that was impossible without a visit to the burns unit on my previous board.
The Asus Striker II is without a doubt the best motherboard I have ever had the pleasure of installing, it's aesthetically pleasing, stable as hell and is the first motherboard i've encountered with a useable set of windows based tools in the form of AI Suite which is 100% stable and provides on the fly overclocking profiles. The included sound card is a step up from the usual flat sounding onboard cards ( yes I know technically it's onboard but it's certainly useable).
My Q6600 at 2.4ghz now idles at 36-38C per core, with some minor overclocking to 2.8ghz it raises a further 1-2C. This is some 5c's lower than my previous board which i'm attributing to the cooler chipsets and higher quality board components/ power phase usage.
The fan cooling the RAM is on a custom made bracket and is the fan from a X2 AMD heatsink with an Asus sticker on it. It's largely unnecessary due to the boards 2 phase Ram power supply.
Yes thats four hard-drives totalling 1.3TB or so. I have windows vista 64 and pictures, movies and music etc on the samsung F1 and my games on a pair of striped 160gb spinpoints. Don't ask me why but it made sense in my head and definitely works as everything loads quicker than ever.
I've broken 15,000 marks in 3dmark '06.
OCZ have once again stirred my wrath, they have recently decided to switch IC's on their RAM sticks......this means those looking to use epp profiles on 4 sticks bought seperately are up shit creek. I flashed the SPD's but could not get things 100% stable with random bluescreens and freezes. I have had to re-flash to the original profiles and despite manually setting the timings over a whole weekend have had to leave things at auto for the sake of my sanity. My 4gb of 1066mhz Ram now runs at just over 700mhz. Another sour OCZ experience.
Well if you've stuck with it this far then I'll thank you and ask you to press the little button at the bottom and leave a comment (even if it's just to call me your favourite expletive).
Lel