well the Rampage 3 Extreme is running now but I wish I had sort of a more
conclusive uh I wish I had something more conclusive as to what exactly was
causing the problem because there okay there's a couple things I ran into first
of all I couldn't get it to post until I removed the 980x that was in there I put
in this Kingston RAM although I haven't tried any other RAM yet and I removed uh
my GTX 26 or rather GTX 8800 GTS 64
video card which now I've tried on another system and it seems to be dead
which is very confusing because it was working up until exactly when I tried to
use it with this system so that's part of why I ran into trouble it's uh really
bad when your tester Parts your your known good components die so anyway I
tried with this GTX 275 that's sitting here and it worked and then I tried with
uh with an evaluation um Radeon 5000
series card and it's working with that as well so we're finally posted into the
BIOS but since the whole point of my original video with the Rampage 3
Extreme was going to be seeing how it reacts with 24 gigs of RAM I thought
before I go any further what I'll do is I'll pull out this Kingston module and
then I will see what happens now that we've actually got the board posting
because we've got a working video card in it I'm going to go ahead and install
my six RAM dims okay we got one this is
going to take take a little while so please bear with me just got the camera
sort of hanging from my neck here I've had some complaints that it causes
dizziness and nausea so um I guess I can
I'll have to disclaim my show from now on that uh watching it may cause you
know vomiting and all those other nasty
pharmaceutical side effects it's okay you guys can handle it
all right there we go so I got my six dims in there it looks all shiny and
gold okay the color scheme doesn't really match but uh that's okay if
you're buying this motherboard you should probably be buying like some Reapers or uh or Platinum Series RAM
anyway rather than the basic gold so
here the little post LEDs this is what actually helped me figure out it was the
VGA card so you can see it goes CPU RAM VGA boot device boom we are booted up
and let's see what it def detects by default for the RAM settings here so
Target Dam frequency 1333 so it got there by default uh let me see oh okay
extreme tweaker is the first option in this board go figure they assume someone
buying a rampage 3 Extreme board is going to want to tweak it a little bit
wow okay so Auto is 1333 we can set it
up to, 1600 although I have no idea what would happen if we did that it looks
like the default voltage for the RAM is going to be 1.5 volts and you know what
since we're you know here anyway why don't we boot up the system and see if
it's actually even remote stable with 1.5 Vols because this ocz RAM is
actually rated for 1.65 Vols at DDR3
1333 CL 99920 so what that could mean is maybe
we could even overclock these modules a little bit and uh and and still run them
within their default voltage so that would be kind of cool so I'm just going
to wait for the system to boot up here let me see if there's anything else
interesting on my desk ooh check this out it's a magne cores but it's not a
real one it's actually just a just a blank just to to demonstrate how large
the CPU is let me see if I have anything else around here to show for for context
I guess I don't really but uh yeah it's really big there I'll kind of put it
there so now you can see how big it is
compared to a memory module okay we're boot it up there we go now I can stop
killing time so here we go why don't we grab Prime 95 you always want to use
blend when you're testing RAM because otherwise it doesn't really test the RAM
and uh let's have a look at our task manager here where it will show our
physical memory total of well that doesn't seem right let's
fire up CPU Zs here and see what's going
on so hold on available free it's only showing 16 gigs of
RAM is that a Windows limitation okay first let's check here
so in CPU Z it shows 24 4 GB of memory
and it shows that it is running at the correct timings except this should probably be 20 but that has almost zero
impact on performance anyway the Tas so I wouldn't worry too much about that and
then uh okay our CPU frequency is correct everything looks hunky dory
except for the fact that the RAM here is only detecting a 16 gigs so you know
what it may actually be a bio setting uh this is not something I've done before
running 20 gigs of RAM so here or 24
gigs of RAM rather so here let's see um
Windows 7 memory
limits search is always your friend when you're troubleshooting
something Windows 7 memory limits here we
go so let's find out what Windows 7 Ultimate is limited to Windows Vista
Windows Vista Windows 7 Windows 7 Ultimate okay should in theory be
limited to 19 2 gigs of RAM but is it
possible that there's uh something else at play here you know I had really hoped
that this video would be more conclusive than all of this but
um why don't we go back into the BIOS and see if there's any kind of setting
that might obviously allow us to see all 24 gigs of RAM because you can see it is
detected in CPU Z it's just a matter of the OS not being able to uh utilize
it you see that all the time if you're running like a 32-bit operating system
you'll see 4 gigs within um memory detection programs but you won't
actually see 4 gigs of addressable
memory space through Windows so okay
here we go okay that's just
frequency memory configuration protect
allows you to lock or unlock the memory configuration well why don't
we okay why don't we just kind of leave that the way it is in here here I don't
see anything that looks like it pertains to
uh H some kind of memory
limit okay voltages are all
good let's see if there's anything in advanc under maybe chipset or CPU which
is where you more often find um extra
memory settings these days because the memory controllers are on the CPUs on
both Intel and AMD
platforms hm
all right well it looks like I am foiled
yet again so once again please feel free
to leave a comment and uh let me know if
you can think of a way for me to get access to all 24 gigs of memory and I
just wanted to address a couple of the ideas that other people had when I was
trying to troubleshoot posting this board uh no I did not turn off the PCI
Express slot although that would have been hilarious and sounds like exactly
the kind of thing I would do um
the problem did not end up being that I had to have a Molex plug here and here
and I even tried with a higher powered graphics card that 275 Co-op and that
did not fix the problem uh the problem was not clearing the
simos um and it was not flashing the BIOS I did not need to flash the BIOS to
get the six core working again in here and uh let me see what some of the other
some of the other good ideas were and uh yeah no you know what I
actually had a lot of good comments a lot of good ideas but but none of them ended up being it it ended up being a
dead video card which is strange because I did already test with the GTX
260 and um yeah I didn't didn't have any luck on
that side either so you know it might be a matter of going home and testing my
GTX 260 now as well to see if maybe that's fried too that would be just
terrible luck so thank you for checking out my video on installing 24 gigs of
RAM in the assus Rampage 3 extreme