Installing more RAM might not be so easy sometimes….

I recently upgraded one of my desktops to 4 gigs of RAM divided up into 4 sticks of 1 gig each. The RAM sticks all match one another which allows for the Dual Channel in my Motherboard to be used, making the OS even faster to use. I tend to only use Corsair in my machines as I personally find it to be the fastest RAM that I have ever used (and you can overclock it quite nicely as well )

Installing RAM into a machine can be one of the simplest things you can do to upgrade you computer except when your machine starts to crash completely out of the blue. I assumed it was the RAM because the machine (which I did build myself) was working fine before I installed the 2 addition sticks. There was 2 gigs of RAM in it before I started the upgrade.

So I took out one stick at a time and rebooted the machine. All went well. I swapped the new spare RAM chip for the one that I have in the computer and rebooted again. Again all went well. So I put the two sticks of RAM in again along with the 2 existing sticks and the OS crashed again. This time I though it might be something to do with the motherboard but I was’t too sure. I ran Memtest a memory testing tool that checks out your RAM to ensure that it is working correctly, a very simple tool to use tool. It told me that was something wrong with my RAM …but it did have the suggestion in the manual, to check my bios to see how the RAM was configured. The motherboard in this desktop is a Gigabyte SLI 650, pretty good board and supports up to 8 gigabytes of RAM in a 4 x 2 Gig configuration.

So I checked the memory configuration in the Bios and there was the problem. About a year ago I had set the power on the memory chips to manual so that I could overclock them but with the addition of the 2 new sticks there just wasn’t enough power for all 4 sticks. A simple fix was to change the settings back to automatic so that the bios could allocate power to the chips as needed…

Crisis averted…