RAM question

[niggles]

Thanks for looking at this thread... I'm stumped on what to do, so any help would be appreciated.
I have 2 sticks of 512meg 3200 on my Asus A8N-SLI, I wanted to upgrade to 2 one gig sticks. I bought 2 sticks of KVR400X64C3A/1G Kingston RAM, which according to the ASUS site is compatible with this board. My BIOS will recognize it, but will not run windows... it keeps restarting after asking me if I wish to boot in to safe mode. With just the 2 sticks of 512 back in it boots just fine. Anyone have any suggestions? Is it simply bad RAM?
Oh, also I tried to simply format off the Windows XP Pro CD, but it won't run the windows startup.... any thoughts?

 

[Oyeve]

Try with one stick at time and see if one flakes out. Or run memtest on the system.

 

[Boyo]

I would run memtest to see if you have some bad sticks.

 

[niggles]

I ran it one at a time... one simply would not boot at all, the other gave a bad check sum error. I would of run a memory test.... if it would boot, right? Do you really know of a way to run a mem test on RAM that won't boot? Anyway... I ended up taking the RAM back to the store and they found it was fine. Said that it was more likely that Kingson has changed the chips that they're using on these DIMMs and didn't tell ASUS of the change... ASUS then continues to say that the RAM is good... So I had to drive all over the place to get some Corsair DDR... Looks like DDR is going the way of the dodo... if you're still running DDR and are in the market for an upgrade I'd suggest getting it soon. I figure it'll either disappear, or the price is going to start going up again.

 

[NelsonMuntz]

Sounds like bad RAM.
Like the others mentioned, download and create a Memtest+ bootable diskette (it does it all for you when you run the downloaded file).
Memtest+ does not need to go into Windows and will test the memory completely.

 

[rudder]

I had this same problem with a Biostar Tforce 6100-939. It would do the exact same thing going into windows... boot, the n lock up or reboot. I threw in some cheap generic ram and it ran fine all day. You may want to check the voltage on the ram and make sure it is set high enough in the BIOS.

 

[niggles]

Guys... it wasn't bad RAM, read the third post in.

Thanks for the help though.