OK, just over a year ago I got an Intel D945GCZ motherboard. I also purchased an OCZ PC2-4200 Dual Channel DDR2 memory kit installed in dual-channel mode.
When I was building the system, I was planning on using a PCI-E video card. As I was putting it together, I tried booting it up w/o the video card (monitor connected to onboard video port) and couldn't get it to post. As soon as I put the vidcard in, it worked fine. Oh well, I thought, I probably will never want onboard video, I'll just ignore it.
Turns out a year later I'm hardly using the system and decided to sell it to my wife's office. I want to keep the PCI-E video card, so I decided I needed to get to the bottom of the onboard video problem. There have been about 30 gazillion new bioses from Intel in the past year, thought that might help, no such luck.
Did troubleshooting with Intel via phone and email, they decided board was probably faulty. Sent it in for RMA last week, just got a brand spanking new board last night. Put it together... SAME PROBLEM!!
OK, so I start pulling every component off to try and figure out what the problem is, for some reason I had never tried playing with the RAM on the original board, but tried pulling one of the modules, voila! thing posts without the video card. However it wasn't booting into Windows properly... hmmm, probably a windows driver is what I thought. But then I'd get it to boot once or twice but it would be really unstable.
I could even boot with both 512 modules installed in the same Bank (single channel mode) but got the same problem.
Pulled out my Windows Memory Diagnostic CD, booted off that, errors all over the place, with both, or either of the modules inserted individually. OK, looks like I got some bad ram? but why did it work fine for the past year with the video card...
Put the video card back in, ram MemDiag overnight in exhaustive mode, no errors whatsoever.
Does this make sense to anyone? I'd like to complain to Intel but figure I'm not gonna get much help since my memory isn't on the 'Tested Memory List' for the board, but I've never really worried about such things in the past. I've got some newer OCZ DDR2-667 modules in my wife's new core duo desktop that I am going to try swapping in later tonight.
Any suggestions would be appreciated!
When I was building the system, I was planning on using a PCI-E video card. As I was putting it together, I tried booting it up w/o the video card (monitor connected to onboard video port) and couldn't get it to post. As soon as I put the vidcard in, it worked fine. Oh well, I thought, I probably will never want onboard video, I'll just ignore it.
Turns out a year later I'm hardly using the system and decided to sell it to my wife's office. I want to keep the PCI-E video card, so I decided I needed to get to the bottom of the onboard video problem. There have been about 30 gazillion new bioses from Intel in the past year, thought that might help, no such luck.
Did troubleshooting with Intel via phone and email, they decided board was probably faulty. Sent it in for RMA last week, just got a brand spanking new board last night. Put it together... SAME PROBLEM!!
OK, so I start pulling every component off to try and figure out what the problem is, for some reason I had never tried playing with the RAM on the original board, but tried pulling one of the modules, voila! thing posts without the video card. However it wasn't booting into Windows properly... hmmm, probably a windows driver is what I thought. But then I'd get it to boot once or twice but it would be really unstable.
I could even boot with both 512 modules installed in the same Bank (single channel mode) but got the same problem.
Pulled out my Windows Memory Diagnostic CD, booted off that, errors all over the place, with both, or either of the modules inserted individually. OK, looks like I got some bad ram? but why did it work fine for the past year with the video card...
Put the video card back in, ram MemDiag overnight in exhaustive mode, no errors whatsoever.
Does this make sense to anyone? I'd like to complain to Intel but figure I'm not gonna get much help since my memory isn't on the 'Tested Memory List' for the board, but I've never really worried about such things in the past. I've got some newer OCZ DDR2-667 modules in my wife's new core duo desktop that I am going to try swapping in later tonight.
Any suggestions would be appreciated!