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Asus A8N-SLI RAM Upgrade Problems

Posted At : January 2, 2007 2:08 PM | Posted By : Nat Papovich
Related Categories: Hardware

I just added two new sticks (matched pair) of 1GB Kingston RAM to my existing matched pair, bringing the total up to 4GB, but not without headaches. This is on my Asus A8N-SLI Premium motherboard.

Usually, adding RAM is as simple as opening the case, filling some slots, close it up and boot. Granted, with DDR RAM, you occasionally need matching pairs in slots A1 and A2 (and B1 and B2). But what I did not know is that my BIOS or CMOS somehow stored identifying information about the RAM sticks and would not boot with the new RAM in, under any configuration.

I would always get 1 long and 2 short beeps, and for the Award BIOS, that signals a video card error. But I knew that couldn't be true since I could just switch back to my old sticks and it would boot fine.

I ended up popping off the CMOS battery for a few seconds, which wiped the BIOS settings, but cleared whatever RAM information it was storing. The PC booted up just fine.

So there it is: 1 long, 2 short on A8N-SLI when adding RAM doesn't mean video card problems.

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Hi
I got also a A8N-SLI premium, and I had the same problem,I try to found a solution on the internet and finally it seems that this MB doesn't sync the ram correctely, so one of the things that you can do is putting a fixed Mhz for your ram n the bios, or like me change Ram until you find one that sync correctly

# Posted By Kingofpunk | 1/3/07 12:23 AM

That's a good idea. I'm glad it worked for you. One thing I did notice is that after clearing the CMOS, the BIOS incorrectly determined the RAM to be 333MHz, not the true 400, which seems to support your idea.

# Posted By Nat Papovich | 1/3/07 7:15 AM

I just tried increasing the ram to 4gb on my A8N SLI32 delux. (from 2gb). All of the sticks are OCZ high performance memory. All sticks work in a 2gb configuration in any slot. The difficulty I had was that I had couldn't even get it to post initially with 4gb. Fixed it by setting the Timing from explicit T1 to auto config (which defaults to T2 now).

My question and I am wondering if others are experiencing this or I'm missing something in the bois, at post I get 3GB OK 4GB total. What I don't understand is how to address all 4gb so that the MB says 4GB OK. It seems like I'm being short-changed by the mobo. I know windows 32-bit has issues with 3gb, but at post I should assume that 4gb should have no problems.

# Posted By JasonFH | 1/19/07 4:55 PM

Hmmm, wondering why you need more than 2GB in first place. XP itself does not benefit from more ram nor do most apps. There are some good forums out there. check pcperspective and xtremesystems

# Posted By Kevin M | 1/26/07 12:46 PM

Kevin -

Although my system cannot address more than 3.2GB of RAM (as reported by Win XP), there is a big difference between 2GB and 3GB. I was *constantly* out of RAM and into swap with Eclipse, MSSQL, Apache, CFMX, Outlook and Firefox running. When working with multi-GB databases, MSSQL shows a dramatic difference in speed when it can keep data in memory, not "virtual memory".

# Posted By Nat Papovich | 1/27/07 3:40 PM

The manual for the board states that due to lack of resources allocation the board cannot pickup 4GB of RAM when 1GB sticks are used and all the slots are filled with 1GB sticks. However in the bios there's a setting called DRAM over 4G remapping. I wonder if this affects how the boards reads or recognizes RAM. Anyone knows??

# Posted By Neuspeed | 2/6/07 10:34 AM

I found an interesting article by microsoft. It clearly states Windows xp SP2(32-bit) will pretty much negate 4G of RAM regardless of what you do.

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=888137

# Posted By Neuspeed | 2/6/07 12:06 PM

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