bad ram port?

[JamesJ]

Hmm got a weird issue, i have a asus m2a-vm green motherboard, and I turned it on the other day and it fritzed out on me (lines through the screen and wouldnt make it past bios boot most of the boots) so I took out all ram reseted motherboard and put ram in 1 by one, anyways through my tests I discovered that if I put ram (any stick) in slot 2 it would show the same symptons but I could fill slots 1-3 and 4 and computer would boot fine, anyone come across this? I am fine running 4 gigs of ram on slots 1-3 and 4 so its not a loss, just really weird in my 14 years of doing computers I have never seen this at all.

 

[Ramy]

I have never seen this either, but it does sound like a bad ram slot.

 

[mloebl]

I just went thru this (one of my boxes did this habitually for weeks before I replaced the mb/cpu.) It had been working fine for months then started having issues so was really annoying. It started with intermittent hangs in Windows, then eventually it would lock up just where your's is. Turns out for me it was the CPU / MB / RAM combination. I took the CPU to another good working machine, and it started having the same problems. Once I took out some of the RAM it started working again. I suspect some of RAM just won't run reliably. (I had both Crucial and Corsair in these systems so not exactly brand X.) The sticks were all on the motherboard and CPU compatibility lists as well.

Even weirder, I noticed the slower clock speed CPU was fine, but as soon as I put in the faster clocked CPU, both systems would flake out. At one point while troubleshooting I even got another CPU and saw the same problem. This is with an Asus and Gigabyte AMD AM2+ based boards running their X2 CPUs. It was also a mix of 110w, 65w and 45w CPUs. Strangely the 110w would work reliabely while the lower power would not, so ruled out power issues. I am running the latest BIOS on all the boxes as well.

I eventually gave up and put in an Intel cpu/board and with the same ram and it's fine... though I much prefer AMD over Intel.

-Mike

 

[JamesJ]

I just went thru this (one of my boxes did this habitually for weeks before I replaced the mb/cpu.) It had been working fine for months then started having issues so was really annoying. It started with intermittent hangs in Windows, then eventually it would lock up just where your's is. Turns out for me it was the CPU / MB / RAM combination. I took the CPU to another good working machine, and it started having the same problems. Once I took out some of the RAM it started working again. I suspect some of RAM just won't run reliably. (I had both Crucial and Corsair in these systems so not exactly brand X.) The sticks were all on the motherboard and CPU compatibility lists as well.

Even weirder, I noticed the slower clock speed CPU was fine, but as soon as I put in the faster clocked CPU, both systems would flake out. At one point while troubleshooting I even got another CPU and saw the same problem. This is with an Asus and Gigabyte AMD AM2+ based boards running their X2 CPUs. It was also a mix of 110w, 65w and 45w CPUs. Strangely the 110w would work reliabely while the lower power would not, so ruled out power issues. I am running the latest BIOS on all the boxes as well.

I eventually gave up and put in an Intel cpu/board and with the same ram and it's fine... though I much prefer AMD over Intel.

-Mike

I am running the amd dual core 5400+ cpu (I forget the name) and have all pny ram except one stick which is corsair...and like you said it has run GREAT for Months not one problem, what I am wondering is if its a short in the ram port, I wonder if it will spread to other areas of the board or just stay central and not go anywhere as I am worried about a spread to hard drives or cpu...its under warrenty so I might just call Asus and see what they say (even though past experiences they will tell me it is somehow my fault).

 

[mloebl]

I am running the amd dual core 5400+ cpu (I forget the name) and have all pny ram except one stick which is corsair...and like you said it has run GREAT for Months not one problem, what I am wondering is if its a short in the ram port, I wonder if it will spread to other areas of the board or just stay central and not go anywhere as I am worried about a spread to hard drives or cpu...its under warrenty so I might just call Asus and see what they say (even though past experiences they will tell me it is somehow my fault).

Good luck, curious to see what they say. I've had good success with Asus (and Newegg who I usually buy thru for support.) My buddy theorized it could have been a bad memory controller in the CPU itself, obviously I tried a couple CPUs so threw that out the window.

-Mike

 

[Hall]

It certainly can happen.... Check some more computer-hardware-centric websites to see if it's a "common" problem. It could just as easily be a one-in-a-million fluke too though.