Rampage III Extreme 24GB RAM Core i7 980X SUCCESS!! Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,567 words · ~7 min read
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well the Rampage 3 Extreme is running now but I wish I had sort of a more
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conclusive uh I wish I had something more conclusive as to what exactly was
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causing the problem because there okay there's a couple things I ran into first
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of all I couldn't get it to post until I removed the 980x that was in there I put
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in this Kingston RAM although I haven't tried any other RAM yet and I removed uh
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my GTX 26 or rather GTX 8800 GTS 64
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video card which now I've tried on another system and it seems to be dead
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which is very confusing because it was working up until exactly when I tried to
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use it with this system so that's part of why I ran into trouble it's uh really
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bad when your tester Parts your your known good components die so anyway I
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tried with this GTX 275 that's sitting here and it worked and then I tried with
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uh with an evaluation um Radeon 5000
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series card and it's working with that as well so we're finally posted into the
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BIOS but since the whole point of my original video with the Rampage 3
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Extreme was going to be seeing how it reacts with 24 gigs of RAM I thought
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before I go any further what I'll do is I'll pull out this Kingston module and
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then I will see what happens now that we've actually got the board posting
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because we've got a working video card in it I'm going to go ahead and install
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my six RAM dims okay we got one this is
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going to take take a little while so please bear with me just got the camera
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sort of hanging from my neck here I've had some complaints that it causes
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dizziness and nausea so um I guess I can
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I'll have to disclaim my show from now on that uh watching it may cause you
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know vomiting and all those other nasty
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pharmaceutical side effects it's okay you guys can handle it
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all right there we go so I got my six dims in there it looks all shiny and
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gold okay the color scheme doesn't really match but uh that's okay if
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you're buying this motherboard you should probably be buying like some Reapers or uh or Platinum Series RAM
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anyway rather than the basic gold so
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here the little post LEDs this is what actually helped me figure out it was the
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VGA card so you can see it goes CPU RAM VGA boot device boom we are booted up
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and let's see what it def detects by default for the RAM settings here so
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Target Dam frequency 1333 so it got there by default uh let me see oh okay
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extreme tweaker is the first option in this board go figure they assume someone
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buying a rampage 3 Extreme board is going to want to tweak it a little bit
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wow okay so Auto is 1333 we can set it
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up to, 1600 although I have no idea what would happen if we did that it looks
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like the default voltage for the RAM is going to be 1.5 volts and you know what
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since we're you know here anyway why don't we boot up the system and see if
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it's actually even remote stable with 1.5 Vols because this ocz RAM is
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actually rated for 1.65 Vols at DDR3
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1333 CL 99920 so what that could mean is maybe
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we could even overclock these modules a little bit and uh and and still run them
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within their default voltage so that would be kind of cool so I'm just going
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to wait for the system to boot up here let me see if there's anything else
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interesting on my desk ooh check this out it's a magne cores but it's not a
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real one it's actually just a just a blank just to to demonstrate how large
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the CPU is let me see if I have anything else around here to show for for context
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I guess I don't really but uh yeah it's really big there I'll kind of put it
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there so now you can see how big it is
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compared to a memory module okay we're boot it up there we go now I can stop
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killing time so here we go why don't we grab Prime 95 you always want to use
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blend when you're testing RAM because otherwise it doesn't really test the RAM
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and uh let's have a look at our task manager here where it will show our
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physical memory total of well that doesn't seem right let's
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fire up CPU Zs here and see what's going
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on so hold on available free it's only showing 16 gigs of
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RAM is that a Windows limitation okay first let's check here
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so in CPU Z it shows 24 4 GB of memory
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and it shows that it is running at the correct timings except this should probably be 20 but that has almost zero
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impact on performance anyway the Tas so I wouldn't worry too much about that and
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then uh okay our CPU frequency is correct everything looks hunky dory
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except for the fact that the RAM here is only detecting a 16 gigs so you know
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what it may actually be a bio setting uh this is not something I've done before
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running 20 gigs of RAM so here or 24
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gigs of RAM rather so here let's see um
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Windows 7 memory
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limits search is always your friend when you're troubleshooting
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something Windows 7 memory limits here we
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go so let's find out what Windows 7 Ultimate is limited to Windows Vista
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Windows Vista Windows 7 Windows 7 Ultimate okay should in theory be
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limited to 19 2 gigs of RAM but is it
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possible that there's uh something else at play here you know I had really hoped
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that this video would be more conclusive than all of this but
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um why don't we go back into the BIOS and see if there's any kind of setting
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that might obviously allow us to see all 24 gigs of RAM because you can see it is
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detected in CPU Z it's just a matter of the OS not being able to uh utilize
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it you see that all the time if you're running like a 32-bit operating system
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you'll see 4 gigs within um memory detection programs but you won't
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actually see 4 gigs of addressable
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memory space through Windows so okay
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here we go okay that's just
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frequency memory configuration protect
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allows you to lock or unlock the memory configuration well why don't
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we okay why don't we just kind of leave that the way it is in here here I don't
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see anything that looks like it pertains to
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uh H some kind of memory
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limit okay voltages are all
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good let's see if there's anything in advanc under maybe chipset or CPU which
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is where you more often find um extra
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memory settings these days because the memory controllers are on the CPUs on
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both Intel and AMD
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platforms hm
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all right well it looks like I am foiled
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yet again so once again please feel free
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to leave a comment and uh let me know if
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you can think of a way for me to get access to all 24 gigs of memory and I
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just wanted to address a couple of the ideas that other people had when I was
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trying to troubleshoot posting this board uh no I did not turn off the PCI
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Express slot although that would have been hilarious and sounds like exactly
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the kind of thing I would do um
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the problem did not end up being that I had to have a Molex plug here and here
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and I even tried with a higher powered graphics card that 275 Co-op and that
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did not fix the problem uh the problem was not clearing the
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simos um and it was not flashing the BIOS I did not need to flash the BIOS to
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get the six core working again in here and uh let me see what some of the other
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some of the other good ideas were and uh yeah no you know what I
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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
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dead video card which is strange because I did already test with the GTX
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260 and um yeah I didn't didn't have any luck on
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that side either so you know it might be a matter of going home and testing my
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GTX 260 now as well to see if maybe that's fried too that would be just
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terrible luck so thank you for checking out my video on installing 24 gigs of
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RAM in the assus Rampage 3 extreme