Peter Haumer

Thanks a lot Morgan.
This is very interesting. Unfortunately, I could not find a way to change
timing or voltage in the Dell bios.

Yes, I purchase the memory as well as the 4 new gigs from Dell specifically
for this system. I also ran the Dell and Microsoft memory tests on both 4gig
configurations with success.

Thanks and best regards,
Peter Haumer.



"Morgan" <morgan@home.com> wrote in message
news:46bc21f0$0$5191$9a6e19ea@unlimited.newshosting.com...
> Even though you have written that the 4x1GB sticks worked perfectly well
> with XP (32bit) by the nature of the limits of that OS not all of that
> memory was being addressed anyway, whether that makes a difference or not
> to the following I'm not sure...
>
> When you populate a motherboard with four sticks of RAM rather than 2
> AFAIK it can place more strain on your memory controller and to compensate
> for this it is often found that lowering your memory timings will help.
> Even though each individual memory stick may have a spd rating of (for
> example) 4-4-4-12 when ran with all 4 memory slots full it can mean that
> timings of 5-5-5-18 are needed for stability. Even if you bought 2x2GB
> sticks of memory they would have slower timings than 2x1GB.
>
> If you are only relying on the spd value to set the memory timings in the
> BIOS then the above problem could well apply. Also make sure that you have
> set the correct voltage for the memory sticks. Again for example a
> particular Gigabyte board defaults to 1.8v and some sticks need 2.1v and
> so an increase of 0.3v is needed.
>
> You could use a copy of memtest to ensure that the memory has no fault,
> ensuring first that the above is not a problem.
>
> I assume that the memory is approved as being compatible for your
> system...?
>
> --
> Regards
>
> Morgan
>
>