P6N-SLi 650i RAM Problem

Question

Hi guys,
I just bought an MSI motherboard - P6N-SLi with the 650i chipset and 430 southbridge. It's a nice motherboard - although that northbridge is pretty hot.
Anyway - I bought a gig of Ram for it too - 2x512Mb OCZ which I know to be some decent enough memory.
The problem is - on the first night whilst installing win xp - it froze. no BSOD - no restart - just froze. I tried again and it was fine. Once XP was installed etc - it began to freeze - totally lock up - every few mins. I had to restart every time. I ran stress tests in the new gfx card (nvidia 8800gts) which was fine. I checked temps and ran other tests and the CPU and PSU and HDDs were all fine.
I had my two sticks of RAM in DIMM 1 and DIMM 3 as the manual said. I then took these out and put them in DIMM 2 and 4. Works perfectly now.
Any ideas why - and if so - whether two more sticks in 1 and 3 would cause issues if I was to upgrade??
Should i send this mobo back? Is it faulty? Or maybe I am missing a BIOS update or setting?
Help is greatly appreciated. - I'm not a n00b, just stuck

Answer 1

Quote from: bobak2000 on 03-March-07, 10:04:31
I had my two sticks of RAM in DIMM 1 and DIMM 3 as the manual said. I then took these out and put them in DIMM 2 and 4. Works perfectly now.
Damn MSI's memory slot color-coding! ...
Ok, just so we're all talking about the same thing, when I look at my (Platinum version) manual, on page 2-7, it's titled "Memory" at the top and has images below there showing 3 alternate configurations for memory.  If you look closely at the lables on the right-hand side of the images, the slots are labeled:
DIMM1  (green, closest to processor)
DIMM3  (green)
DIMM2  (orange, closest to processor)
DIMM4  (orange)
...note that the second one is actually labeled "DIMM3", not DIMM2, as you might expect.  So the manual is in fact telling you to install into DIMM1 & DIMM2 - not DIMM1 & DIMM3.  In other words, in the green slot closest to processor and in the orange slot closest to processor - those are DIMM1 & DIMM2.  So, unlike pretty much every other board manufacture, to run in dual-channel mode, you need to have one stick in a green slot and one stick in an orange slot.  It sounds like you were putting them in the right slots... just calling them the wrong names .
Now that that's cleared up ... can you list the exact part number of your ram?
Quote from: bobak2000 on 03-March-07, 10:04:31
I don't seem to be hearing anything positive about this motherboard to be fair.
No offense intended, but:
a) "To be fair", There's LOTs of positive things being reported from MSI P6N owners... I think we tend to focus in on the negative reports (human nature), or ones that confirm what we suspect to be the case.  I'll grant you that there are some people reporting problems, but that's true about pretty much every board out there.  I may be guilty of the oposite effect, but as far as I can tell, there's actually a lot more positive than negative being reported about these boards, so I'm a little confused that you haven't seen anything positive (?).
b) Also human nature, people who are generally happy or not having problems tend not to post anything at all.  So you're much more likely to see negative reports to begin with.
...you're actually the second person I've seen report this particular problem (Edge1, who just posted is the other one).  It's pretty puzzling, for sure.  If you can post the model/part number of the memory you're using, maybe we can figure something out.  I think Edge made some progress earlier by bumping the mem voltage up to what the memory was rated for.. have you tried that?