CPU, Mobo, or RAM?

[RucHee]

Hey guys, I'm having a tough time trying to figure out which piece of hardware is giving me so many problems.

I have 2x 1gb CRUCIAL Ballistix Tracer PC4000 DDR500 sticks in my PC. When I run them both at the same time (dual channel), the system tends to crash, but never has BSOD's, just hard restart crashes. If I take one stick out, the system seems to work find, but is very bogged down.

I have ran memtest86 from the bios settings, and it came back with ZERO errors, so that's starting to make me think it's not the ram, but I can't say for sure.

For some reason, the ram will not work together AT ALL in SINGLE channel mode. Not sure why this is the case.

Current Specs:

DFI LanParty UT SLI-DR Socket 939
AMD Athlon64 X2 4400+
2x 1GB Crucial Ballistix Tracer PC4000 DDR500
nVidia 7950GX2 (Dell Pull)


I guess my main questions are, what exactly would cause this? Why doesn't the ram work in single channel mode at all? Why will it work fine with single sticks, but not together? Could this be a mobo problem, and I just need to replace the mobo, or is it most likely the RAM? Could the CPU have anything to do with the hard non-bsod crashes?

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[robisbell]

memtest is not in the bios, whatever you ran was not memtest. I'd get The Ultimate Boot CD and run memtest86+ from it for 6 hours with both sticks.

 

[RucHee]

DFI mobo has a "run Memtest" option in bios. I turned the option on, rebooted, and memtest ran for about two hours without a single error coming up.

 

[jackschmittusa]

What is the recommended voltage for the ram, 2.2v? Stock setting on the mb is likely 1.8v.

 

[RucHee]

That seems very low.

I read that the stock Ballistix voltage is 2.5V @ PC3200, and 2.8V at PC4000.

I'm currently running it at 2.8V @ PC4000.

Timings suggested are 3-4-4-10, and i'm running 3-5-5-10 to be safe.

 

[cubby1223]

Put the ram back to pc3200 speeds and timings to auto detect and see what happens.

 

[jackschmittusa]

My bad! Didn't register with me that it was DDR. I was talking DDR2 voltages.

Brain works better after some sleep and a re-boot, lol.

 

[RucHee]

Unfortunately I've tried that before. I reset the entire bios to "optimal settings", still without luck. System still has hard crashes.

It's odd though... Everytime I've had memory problems in the past it's always ended up in a BSOD, with some sort of memory dump or something of that nature. Now it's just BAAM down for the count, hard reboot by itself.

I was thinking it may have been my hard drive, because everytime it reboots, I hear a click noise that sounds like the hard drive. Only thing is, I've tried 4 hard drives, all of them produce the same sound, and all of them continue to crash.

I'm leaning more toward a mobo problem myself... The reasoning for that is that the ram SHOULD be able to work in single channel mode, but will not. Also, if it was a RAM issue, it would most likely produce a BSOD. If the RAM was bad enough to not produce a BSOD, it would probably not boot with the ram, am i right?

Any suggestions or thoughts please post.

Thank you.