Updating drivers....

[Kirk Gittings]

I have F5, even F7 says it improves memory compatibility.

Is bios hard to upgrade? I've never done it. I'm leery of Beta anything. Maybe the one below it, F10?

[Leigh]

Using higher-speed memory than originally came with the machine won't matter.
It will just run at the maximum bus speed, which would be lower than its max.

It's like a sports car. Just because it can do 200 mph doesn't mean you have to drive that fast.

On most MBs it's important that all installed memory sticks be identical. Mixing types can cause problems.

I NEVER update drivers unless there's a very good reason to do so, for a specific driver.
Did I say NEVER??? I meant NEVER.

I would not recommend upgrading the BIOS unless you KNOW that there's a problem with it. Although modern MBs are generally designed to support such upgrades, there is a possibility for problems. If such occurs, the machine is dead.

I've earned a very good living designing computers since 1975. I started working with personal computers 10 years before the IBM PC was introduced.
I build all of my own computers, of which I have quite a few.

- Leigh

[Peter De Smidt]

I have upgraded a bios before, and it wasn't a problem, but as Leigh said, if something goes wrong it can be no fun. That said, it's exactly these types of issues that may be fixed by a bios upgrade. Boards are rushed to market, often before all of the software bugs are worked out. You'd want to read a bit about it before doing it.

I did a little googling about your motherboard and memory issues, and it did turn up some stuff.

You can run memtest on your memory. See: http://www.memtest.org/.

[Leigh]

Boards are rushed to market, often before all of the software bugs are worked out.

Sorry, but I must disagree.

There's a long lead-time on MBs, because the whole processor and supporting chip set must be completed, and the MBs are being designed and fabricated in parallel with that effort.

There's a lot of time devoted to testing at the IC manufacturer before the chips are ever released to the market.

Software definition is the very first step in designing a microprocessor. The μP is designed to implement that s/w.
If there's a bug in the design such that it fails to meet the s/w spec, the bug is corrected before the μP is ever released.

I've had product introductions delayed because of such difficulties, but it's quite unusual for problems to crop up after chip sets are released.
When they do, the symptoms and causes are well-documented.

- Leigh

[Peter De Smidt]

My experience is otherwise, especially with enthusiast products. If you read builds on enthusiast sites, such as Tom's Hardware, you will regularly read about bios updates required to get promised "features" working correctly, but it sounds like I have about a decade less experience building computers than Leigh. Thus I'm sure he's right, and I don't want to waste any more time arguing about it.

[Brian C. Miller]

Kirk, here's the list link: motherboard_memory_ga-ep45t-ud3lr.pdf

Leigh: I used to work as a lab tech for a manufacturer. I worked directly with the hardware engineers, one of whom used to be a chip (CPU) designer at Intel. A customized BIOS can, indeed, have bugs in it. High-speed memory can be on the hairy edge of operation, and there can be lots of things that show up later. The BIOS development doesn't necessarily have a long lead time.

[Leigh]

Brian,

The motherboard BIOS is not a "custom" BIOS.

They're done by companies that have been in that business for many years, like Award. They know what they're doing.

They have direct access to the manufacturers during the design phase for the micro, and know everything there is to know about it.

It's a profit thing. One major error can cost them a lot of money.

This is not like the garbage consumer s/w that floods the market, with more errors than you can count.

I've written quite a few "custom" BIOS packages, and they're quite a bit different than what comes on a commercial MB.

- Leigh

[Leigh]

My experience is otherwise, especially with enthusiast product.

I think the problem is with the "enthusiasts", not with the MB manufacturers.

The "enthusiasts" that I've encountered have been gamers who are over-clocking and otherwise violating product specs, and trying to make their Frankenstein monster work.

I haven't worked in that market. My experience has been exclusively industrial.

- Leigh

[Greg Miller]

It sounds like that last extra 4GB may be drawing a bit too much voltage. Try editing the BIOS. In the Advanced memory Settings, change "Performance Enhance" form turbo to standard to see if that helps. Also check to see if System Memory Multiplier is set to Auto or to a specific speed.

[Peter De Smidt]

If there weren't problems with the shipping version of the bios, there would be no need for updates. In this case, quite a common one with consumer boards, there were quite a few. It is standard enthusiast builder practice to not load any software contained on the cds included with the motherboard, as they are inevitably out of date.

Changing topics, there traditionally was a distinction between consumer systems and photo or video editing workstations. In the consumer realm, very few people needed to max out their ram. Until very recently, gamers for instance regularly used the fastest two sticks of memory that they could get. Adding more memory lead to less performance. (There was also the cost issue, and memory used to be much more expensive than it is now.)

As a result of this, manufactures did not concentrate on getting consumer boards to work with all of the memory slots populated, something that would've been very important for a workstation. Fixing this is not necessarily cheap or easy. Nonetheless, they included the slots, because of marketing pressures. If you do some reading on test sites you'll see many older consumer boards simply didn't work with maxed out memory. This is something that is changing for the better, but doesn't appear to be completely gone.

Kirk will have to decide if he should keep the most memory that currently works ok, or if he should spend more time trouble-shooting it.