Hey everyone,
This month has been a terrible month for my computers and I; thought I'd share some of it in case someone else finds it useful. Rated PG-13 for partial nudity and fictitious cake.
Summary:
If you're getting an ASUS Rampage Formula, think again about the RAM you get for it: in particular, avoid the DDR2 PC2-8500 (1066mhz) sticks of OCZ ram.
In-Depth:
First off, to clarify, this was my sig rig (I've made changes to it since).
I've had this computer for roughly a year, (for longer, actually, but I did a total upgrade around a year ago, all but the ram). I was happy, all was good! Yippee, wahoo, pies and cakes... that sort of thing.
However, not all was dandy in the land of oz, all throughout, I had the dreaded Driver Reset issue with my 4870x2's, they weren't very frequent, but they weren't rare, and it was frustrating. Each time it was a race to save and close before the forth and often fatal reset (followed by a BSoD). What you get when your sidekicks have no brain nor heart *ahem*, anywho...
When the catalyst 9.1 came out, the resets vanished. And another problem surfaced: 0x7F BSoDs, but I ignored it, they were rare. I was lazy.
The year passed, and at the beginning of this month, the problems began.
My computer BSoD'd at random times within a couple minutes of booting up. Eventually, it stopped POSTing. But I had changed nothing. Murphy had found me.
Each time it had reset, I could see the computer shutting itself off to reset the BIOS -- until eventually it wouldn't POST at all. On top of that, Murphy cast a "Develop 1x800 pixel line of dead pixels* on my 3007WFP!
Fun.
I was shazzing bricks about now, throwing books at passing seniors.
I tried changing the GPUs, PSU, even the CPU, to no avail. I eventually plugged in the Rampage Formula's LCD Poster display to see what message it'd throw out. And sure enough, it gave me "DET DRAM". RWAR!
So I tried messing with the RAM, and after a lot of heartache, I discovered only one of those four sticks would POST. Not one of any of the sticks at a time, but one particular stick. It was curious, of the four sticks, the one that worked was the only one I ever RMAed.
Perhaps it was a newer revision? Regardless I tried the sticks on different computers, ran days and days of memtest on them, and none of them produced errors. I tried other, older ram (an XMS2 PC2-6500 pair), and they worked without hitch. I tried running them at 800mhz and even lower. Still no luck.
So I tried to see if voltage was the issue.
I played and tampered with the BIOs to try to find a NB + DRAM combination that the sticks would agree with (I assumed it might not be getting enough juice, and had read that the Rampage has issues with 4GB of 1066 ram). I messed with the timings and on and on I went.
The best I got was running three sticks with vicious BSoDing. In hindsight, I suppose the best I actually got were two sticks running stable at 1066.
But the configs I tried worked at random, a stick or two might work, but once rebooted, would stop working again. The same BIOs and physical config would produce different results each time it started up.
(By this point I was singing nursery rhymes to keep me from going insane...... again)
To find out more, I went to ASUS's website and looked up the Rampage Formula's QVL, and sure enough, my ram wasn't on that list. At another point, I googled the Rampage's QVL, and came across a different list that seemed much more populated, and sure enough, my ram was on it.
I was confused. I then tried updating my BIOs to 0803 (as a spur of the moment thing), to no avail.
And somewhere I just had to give up.
In the end, I sold off my ram, and bought me a pair of TWIN2X4096-8500C5DF dominator sticks; they went in and viola, right out of the box, even without changing the voltage, all was good. And it's been running for a week now.
On a side note: I'd like to see a better QVL for the ASUS rampage formula. ASUS' documentation seems terrible, XDD. Am I the only one who's bothered that their changelogs for their BIOS updates are one liners with bad grammer? Bad grammer aside, it doesn't seem right to think that each BIOs (being at least 100 revisions apart) would only offer one change.
Thor is not satisfied!
Anywho! word of warning to anyone aspiring for an ASUS Rampage Formula (or any one in the Rampage or Maximus series, it seems); the OCZ2N1066SR2GK would be a gamble.
And kudos to you, reader of long posts! You are a brave one.
Cheers!
