AsRock 990FX Extreme3 Ram problem

If you know you have a good seating of the memory- and have checked the both sticks of ram in both slots- either the slot is dirty- or your haveing some issue with running dual channel. Clearing cmos and reflashing the bios may fix it- but after eleminating all software issues its time to look into getting an rma. Try those ram sticks in another computer to figure out if its the rams fault or the boards fault. The dma is on die now so i could possibly be a "lemon" cpu - but unlikely

I am having this exact same problem with an ASRock 970 Extreme3 motherboard and the 4GBx2 Gskill Ripjaws kit.

This is not a sensical proposition. I have built thousands of servers and personal computers over the years and have had to deal with bad RAM and DIMMs time and again.

If the RAM or one of the DIMMs was bad, the symptoms would be different. Again:
The RAM is detected and operational by the BIOS, or in this case the UEFI. The memory is also detected by Windows.

If there was an issue with the seating of the chip, or the DIMM itself, you would either be unable to POST or you wouldn't see the RAM detected at all.

That being said, here's what I've got so far with mine...

This was a working build that belonged to my company. Someone formatted it and left it sitting with a new Win 7 Ultimate SP1 install.

My boss asked me to make use of it. I was about to join it to our domain when I noticed the "8.00 GB (3.98 usable)" in system properties, so I decided to fix it quickly as I just knew what was wrong...

Unfortuntely, it's not the Maximum Memory setting in msconfig as I suspected. That setting is not being utilized.

So I went to the BIOS, or in this case UEFI, to look for something like memory mapping. I found IOMMU and various overclocking capabilities, but no memory mapping. At the time, this mobo was running UEFI version P1.20.

I went and checked ASRock's page for an update and found the latest UEFI to be P1.60, so I updated it. I didn't find any new relevant settings, though.

I've been googling and banging my head on the wall with this for hours now. All the articles and solutions I find for this issue suggest the things I've already checked. The only change I've been able to make is getting it from 3.98 usable to 4.00 usable by enabling the maximum memory setting in msconfig and setting it to 8192. After rebooting it was enabled but the value was 0, which is weird, and the usable went up by .02, so whatever make sense of that... anyhow, ***?

Any ideas besides memory mapping and msconfig? Maybe there's something in this UEFI that is worded and/or labeled ambiguously but would correct the issue?

I want to reiterate... this is not a Nintendo. The DIMM isn't "dirty" and the RAM is seated properly. The system detects the RAM and it is fully functional. This is an issue related either to BIOS settings or something in Windows, but I just don't know what it is... yet. Any assistance or suggestions are welcome.

I had a similar issue, and if the RAM isn't seated properly it will give you problems. The RAM needs to be in full contact with the socket, if not it will be down-clocked and made into single channel memory.
Hope this helps.
http://www.youtube.com/thelaummaniac

I ran into a similar problem with my 990FX Extreme 3 board today, with 4x4GB DDR3-1600. 16GB is detected and system had been running fine until a few days ago. It began requiring several power on/offs to get the BIOS to even come up, after which it would boot fine. Today it started rebooting and then a BSOD a couple times.

Noticed in the BIOS that I was in single-channel mode. Set the ram back to AUTO and it would go Dual-Channel, but setting the XMP Profile would put me back into single-channel.

Popped out the ram, hit the MB slots with some canned air and checked the contacts. Popped them back in and everything is working fine again.