OCZ Gold PC6400 & Asus M2N series

GHoosdumGHoosdum Icrontian
edited August 2006 in Hardware
Hey neat, I think this is my first post in the OCZ area...

Anyway, I recently spec'd out a customer system with the 2GB Gold PC6400 pack and an Asus M2N-SLI motherboard.

Some guy is bitching about incompatibility between this RAM and the Asus M2N series on the Newegg reviews. Please tell me that guy's experience is just a fluke and these will work fine together... because, as far as I know, the parts have already been ordered in for this customer. ;)

Thanks!
Rob

Comments

  • RyderRyder Kalamazoo, Mi Icrontian
    edited July 2006
    Asus did a royal number on the bios for the board...the only thing it is really happy with is Micron IC's....the Gold PC6400 do not have Micron IC's on them so they have been problematic.

    There is a new bios in the works that solves many of the booting issues, but you do need to get it booted to flash it, so this many times involves a stick of DDR533 (PC4200) "cheapo" ram so you can get the bios flashed.

    Once they are up and running....they work just beautifully.
  • GHoosdumGHoosdum Icrontian
    edited July 2006
    Thanks, Eric. I may have to make a quick trip to Microcenter for some cheapo RAM when the board arrives. Is the working BIOS still in beta, or is it a release version?

    I'm surprised that the motherboards can cause incompatibility issues with the RAM these days, since AM2 has the IMC.
  • TheLostSwedeTheLostSwede Trondheim, Norway Icrontian
    edited July 2006
    You don't have to buy more ram just to get it to boot. Just send the kit to us and we will re-program it. or even better, make sure the store have already flashed the board for you.
  • GHoosdumGHoosdum Icrontian
    edited July 2006
    Ready for an interesting story?

    CB put the PC together last night. I was there for the build, because I wanted to see AM2. Big deal... and apparently the low-end X2 chips don't come with the AMD heatpipe cooler now? Anyway, we booted the PC, and got 1 long and 2 short beeps. At first it did this no matter what, and this is the same post code that we get when there is no RAM in the machine, so we assumed it was the RAM incompatibility. We finally got it to boot into BIOS with one stick of RAM in the thing.

    Once in BIOS, I set the Tras to 15 and the command rate to 2T. I also set the speed to 400MHz. Magically, the rig booted. And we installed Windows. And, as nervous as it made us, we updated the BIOS from the version 0202 that came with the board to version 0304. We also have both sticks of RAM in the machine now.

    We thought that would work. It didn't - apparently this BIOS doesn't completely remove the compatibility issues, because turning the speed of the RAM back up to either 667 or 800 (we didn't try 533) the computer will lock up during Windows loading. The problems are at least cleared up to the point where the rig seems completely stable with the RAM at 400MHz, but not at all if we raise the speed to its stock level.

    Any ideas? Did we not get the version of the BIOS that clears up the compatibility issue? Is there something else we're missing here?
  • RyderRyder Kalamazoo, Mi Icrontian
    edited July 2006
    The M2N-SLI hasn't had a bios update yet that we know of.

    Tony is working on getting a reply from Asus as to whether the M2N and M2N32 can use the same bios...right now we are on hold regarding the M2N
  • GHoosdumGHoosdum Icrontian
    edited July 2006
    Wow, that's harsh (on Asus' part). I'm surprised we were able to get the PC working at all, in that case!

    Can you let us know as soon as you find out? This client is itching to get his new PC, and I don't want to wait too long to fix the troubles. :(
  • TheLostSwedeTheLostSwede Trondheim, Norway Icrontian
    edited July 2006
    Ghoosdum,

    Try the other pair of memoryslots and see if that works better. It worked pretty well with the MSI board.
  • GHoosdumGHoosdum Icrontian
    edited July 2006
    Will do. Also, do you recommend upping the memory voltage in BIOS? Would that even help the board be more stable at higher RAM speeds?
  • TheLostSwedeTheLostSwede Trondheim, Norway Icrontian
    edited July 2006
    It seems to help with DDR2 a bit, yes.
  • CBCB Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Der Millionendorf- Icrontian
    edited July 2006
    I just noticed this thread :) I'll try these two things tonight and report back.
  • GHoosdumGHoosdum Icrontian
    edited July 2006
    CB Droege wrote:
    I just noticed this thread :)

    I thought I sent you a link in a PM?
    CB Droege wrote:
    I'll try these two things tonight and report back.

    Cool, I'm anxious to see if it has any effect. :thumbsup:
  • CBCB Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Der Millionendorf- Icrontian
    edited July 2006
    Okay, I finally got around to try this stuff (I'm proly gonna have to give this client a discount since I'm a week late with his PC already... Damn these compatability issues)

    I'm stuck.

    I want to raise the memory voltage as suggested, but I can't find the option anywhere in the BIOS menues. Can you point me to where the option is?
  • GHoosdumGHoosdum Icrontian
    edited July 2006
    We found the option. We had some visibility malfunctions, as it was one of the greyed-out options when "AI" was set to Auto. Once we set it to manual (while randomly changing BIOS settings, we finally noticed the RAM voltage option. So far it has booted into Windows just fine. We'll see how stable it is...
  • CBCB Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Der Millionendorf- Icrontian
    edited July 2006
    The system is working just as I want it to now... Those suggestions worked out great.
  • GHoosdumGHoosdum Icrontian
    edited July 2006
    Awesome. Hopefully we'll have a happy customer. :thumbsup:
  • CBCB Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Der Millionendorf- Icrontian
    edited July 2006
    I just gave him the system a couple minutes ago, and he's in love with it. Especially the external audio console that came with the Audigy 4. He's very impressed with the features, and with how quiet we were able to make the system. That 'quiet case' made a serious difference.

    I did, however, forget that I had told him I would also grab him a new keyboard and tack it onto him invoice (dolp!) so, I'll be stopping at Microcenter this evening to grab a nice but cheap keyboard to give him tomorrow.
  • TheLostSwedeTheLostSwede Trondheim, Norway Icrontian
    edited July 2006
    Sorry i have been a bit slow lately, but i am on a holiday so i am connecting through 3G whenever i can. Everythng sorted out now?
  • CBCB Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Der Millionendorf- Icrontian
    edited July 2006
    Well, he just brought it back to me complaining of slowness. He says that the screen refresh is very slow, even just scolling thru notepad, so I'm gonna take it back and check it out... But that's proly not the RAM. The first thing I'll try is to update the graphics driver...

    Thanks for your help with the RAM, it seems to be working great now.
  • GHoosdumGHoosdum Icrontian
    edited July 2006
    I'd almost guarantee a graphics driver issue there - I usually see that kind of lag while the graphics driver is in a partially-installed state (particularly with the Catalysts) and when no graphics driver is installed.
  • CBCB Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Der Millionendorf- Icrontian
    edited July 2006
    Same here, that's why it's my first step ;)
  • ZanthianZanthian Mitey Worrier Icrontian
    edited July 2006
    Did you solve this issue?
  • CBCB Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Der Millionendorf- Icrontian
    edited July 2006
    Hope so, he hasn't called me back again, so I guess he's happy with it now.
  • GearCatGearCat
    edited July 2006
    Here's what OCZ tech support had to say about using OCZ DDR2 PC2-7200 Platinum SLI-Ready Edition memory with the Asus M2N32-SLI motherboard:

    I do not believe the M2N32-SLI WorkStation board supports EPP profiles with the original BIOS, you will need to update to the 502 version for compatibility purposes. The EPP RAM is great for those users who do not wish to adjust their BIOS extensively or are uncomfortable doing so, but still want to get the most out of their memory. The EPP PC2-7200 RAM would be suitable for your system and I think you will be quite happy with the performance afforded by upgrading to this product.
  • terruterru
    edited August 2006
    Hi, I just registered to try and share my own experiences related to this.

    I have an M2N-sli deluxe board, and am using the 2gig ddr2 OCZ value kit 5400. In order to get the system to boot, I had to go out and buy some cheapo ram to flash the bios from 202 to 304. Once flashed, it was possible to boot, so I installed the OS using the cheapo ram, then swapped in my OCZ ram, and it seemed to work.

    The real problem is only visible after some use. The system appears to be completly unstable using the OCZ ram. I used nothing but the newest drivers from the internet, but the results where the same. System would often not boot up, the system was unstable in windows, and had loads of corrupt file messages. I have just tried boosting the ram voltage to 2.10 after reading this forum, and would like to know how the rest of you are handling the situation.

    Thanks!
  • primesuspectprimesuspect Beepin n' Boopin Detroit, MI Icrontian
    edited August 2006
    I moved my 2 sticks of OCZ to the "wrong" slots - slots b1&b2 (the black slots) and I've been 100% stable since.

    Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe + OCZ PC26400 "special ops"
  • GHoosdumGHoosdum Icrontian
    edited August 2006
    This simple switch, more than anything else, seems to resolve problems with this board/RAM combo very reliably.
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