8gb (4 x 2gb) on EVGA 680i Motherboard?

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unixadm

Gawd
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Jun 13, 2002
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Does anyone have any experience running four 2gb sticks of DDR2 on an EVGA 680i A1 motherboard? I'm running a 4gb kit of Patriot Extreme PC-6400 right now and it works great. However I do a lot of virtual machine work because I'm a Systems Administrator. So converting a physical server to a Vmware server and performing test upgrades, heck even Windows domain migrations are all things I work with at home. Running 4-7 virtual machines in Vmware Server takes it's toll on 4gb of memory. So I bought another 4gb of Patriot since Frys.com has it for $219 (I just paid $279 3 weeks ago). If it does not work I'll use it in a SFF I'm building, but I'm hoping it will. I only run X64, so I'm all good there. Can't wait for the Q6600 to drop in price - I could use the extra cores. :)

Right now I'm running 400 x 8, Synced/Linked with my memory at DDR800, 1.9V. I don't plan to go any higher.
 
Yes but be careful of heat. And don't let it go into S3 suspend-to-ram state, because the memory i still fully powered, but the fans are turned off. And if you've overclocked & overvolted it, the problem is exacerbated.
Other than that, it works fine. Provided you're running a reasonable OS with a recent kernel! I had several probs with that. Now using OpenSUSE x86_64.
 
I never suspend the system so that won't be a problem. I'm running Vista X64 and XP64 as my OS of choice with VMWARE on top of that. Thanks for the info!!
 
I had major issues going to 4GB using 4 modules with my EVGA boards. I just pulled the other two modules out and threw them into another PC.
 
Dan, you are certainly one to be in the know. I guess I'll just play it by ear and see what happens. I've read some people have had luck doing it while others have not. If they don't work then I'll just stick to 4gb and use the other 4gb in another system. If it works, well then I'll consider myself luckly... and I don't have very good luck. :)

The Patriot ram has worked flawless in my EVGA board though, better than the previous Corsair or OCZ sticks I had in there.
 
unixadm said:
Dan, you are certainly one to be in the know. I guess I'll just play it by ear and see what happens. I've read some people have had luck doing it while others have not. If they don't work then I'll just stick to 4gb and use the other 4gb in another system. If it works, well then I'll consider myself luckly... and I don't have very good luck. :)

The Patriot ram has worked flawless in my EVGA board though, better than the previous Corsair or OCZ sticks I had in there.
Click to expand...

I've done some research on it and it really depends on the modules that you use. For example Corsair Dominator PC6400 C4 and C3 modules are said to be able to do it, but I can tell you for sure that my OCZ Flex XLC PC9200 modules will not. I've disabled EPP and tried to run them at 800MHz, 667MHz, at all kinds of voltages and timings with no success. My 122-CK-NF68-A1 is slightly more stable with four chips than my 122-CK-NF68-AR is, but that's not entirely stable either. Windows seems to work ok but games and other applications crash within seconds.

My ASUS Striker on the other hand is much worse. It won't work with any modules I've tried except for Corsair Dominator PC8888, PC9136, PC8500 modules. It will also work with my OCZ XTC PC7200 EPP Modules. It will not in any way shape or form work with my OCZ Flex XLC PC9200 modules. No settings, no voltage ranges or configurations will work when those are installed.

Basically, the 680i boards are picky in general and you can't just throw any old modules on them and expect good results. Many modules can work well, but will require tweaking. The Corsair Dominator modules will just work without any changes. Thoiugh I've heard the PC6400 Dominator modules are hit or miss too. There are a few different model Dominator PC6400 modules and some versions with certain ICs work better than others.

I've owned 3 or 4 of those EVGA 680 SLI boards and their behavior has always been uniform in regard to memory.
 
Dan_D said:
I've done some research on it and it really depends on the modules that you use. For example Corsair Dominator PC6400 C4 and C3 modules are said to be able to do it, but I can tell you for sure that my OCZ Flex XLC PC9200 modules will not. I've disabled EPP and tried to run them at 800MHz, 667MHz, at all kinds of voltages and timings with no success. My 122-CK-NF68-A1 is slightly more stable with four chips than my 122-CK-NF68-AR is, but that's not entirely stable either. Windows seems to work ok but games and other applications crash within seconds.

My ASUS Striker on the other hand is much worse. It won't work with any modules I've tried except for Corsair Dominator PC8888, PC9136, PC8500 modules. It will also work with my OCZ XTC PC7200 EPP Modules. It will not in any way shape or form work with my OCZ Flex XLC PC9200 modules. No settings, no voltage ranges or configurations will work when those are installed.

Basically, the 680i boards are picky in general and you can't just throw any old modules on them and expect good results. Many modules can work well, but will require tweaking. The Corsair Dominator modules will just work without any changes. Thoiugh I've heard the PC6400 Dominator modules are hit or miss too. There are a few different model Dominator PC6400 modules and some versions with certain ICs work better than others.

I've owned 3 or 4 of those EVGA 680 SLI boards and their behavior has always been uniform in regard to memory.
Click to expand...

Thanks for all the great information. I will advise when I receive the modules if they work or not. I won't be too upset over it as I can use them elsewhere, but it would be nice to load this system up with memory.
 
unixadm said:
Thanks for all the great information. I will advise when I receive the modules if they work or not. I won't be too upset over it as I can use them elsewhere, but it would be nice to load this system up with memory.
Click to expand...

That was my thought as well and that's what happened. I had to use those extra modules in another system.
 
I have 4 of those ram modules and I cant run orthos more then 20mins ram test with 2 or more of them in my dfi p965-s board and my vdimm is 2.1 1:1 timings. I would be interested to know if your evga board is stable with all 4 of them in and working fine while running a stablility test with orthos because I am seriously looking at another MB if I cant use all 4 of my sticks. My issue is here if you want to read it. I hope you have better luck with your ENGA then my DFI.

http://csd.dficlub.org/forum/showthread.php?t=2805
 
ServerKing said:
I have 4 of those ram modules and I cant run orthos more then 20mins ram test with 2 or more of them in my dfi p965-s board and my vdimm is 2.1 1:1 timings. I would be interested to know if your evga board is stable with all 4 of them in and working fine while running a stablility test with orthos because I am seriously looking at another MB if I cant use all 4 of my sticks. My issue is here if you want to read it. I hope you have better luck with your ENGA then my DFI.

http://csd.dficlub.org/forum/showthread.php?t=2805
Click to expand...

Good luck using 4 sticks of memory on non-Intel chipset based motherboards. As far as you not being able to do so on the P965 from DFI, well that just screams of DFI poorly implementing things on thier side. I can run four of virtually any module in my P5W DH.
 
The two additional 2gb Patriot PC6400 sticks showed up today and I installed them this evening in my EVGA 680i A1, totaling 8gb at DDR800 (400 FSB). All appears well on my Vista X64 system thus far. Orthos ran for a few hours in blend without any issues. No crashes or odd application problems. I'll run it for a few days and report back.

This ram is a steal at $99 a stick. I'm also under volting the memory at 1.95. I ran the first two sticks at 1.90 without any issues and bumped it .5 just as a precautionary due to having all of the banks full.
 
I'm surprised to hear how well it's running with a 680i board, let's hope it lasts! Have you run memtest yet? Oh, and your sig still says 4GB- 'don't want to flaunt your extra e-peen?

On an unrelated note, how's your TJ09? I don't know whether or not to buy one.
 
Here is my question: Why did you go with 8GB and take the risk of it not working? 4GB I understand having especially if you run Vista, but 8GB? Surely if you had the burning desire to buy hardware you could have put the money into something else for your PC that would have been more useful.

I'm not intending to start a debate or flame war, I just want to know why you decided on 8GB. I wouldn't have done it personally, I would have invested in water blocks or something like that, but to each their own.
 
Dan,

Everyone wonders why people do things, that's human nature. Why did I buy this freakin huge 37" Westy last weekend that I'm staring at? I dunno.. that was an impulse buy, but the ram was not. I have worked the past 12 years as a Solaris/Linux/Unix and heck even a Windows administrator. Now that I'm a bit older, I now manage a good team that deals with enterprise hardware on a daily basis. Part of my job right now is to move parts of the infrastructure my team administrates to virtual servers. So I'm doing a lot of testing presently with multiple virtual machines, and those machines consume memory. Now since this is my primary desktop at home, I want it to perform reasonably well. Instead of running a PowerEdge server or something at my house, I'm just using my home system to test these migrations. To do that, I need memory to prevent the OS from swapping out. I triple boot Ubuntu X64, Vista X64, and Windows XP X64 depending on what I'm doing. I have a fairly high end home computer, and I'm in a financial position that I can buy pretty much whatever I'd like within reason. So $200 for 4gb of memory is not a huge ding to my overall budget. So while some people may buy other add-ons and accessories for various reasons, I had a use for more memory. That's why I run 64bit operating systems in the first place.

So the 8gb wasn't for an e-penis extension or anything. When I'm done with my testing, I can use that memory in another system. I've paid $300 for 1gb of memory, so $200 for 4gb seemed like a great deal. To top it off, Frys.com being the poor company they are failed to cancel my other order which was for the 4gb dual kit that was back-ordered. I gave them over a week to cancel it and it STILL shipped yesterday. So now I have another 4gb showing up that I'll have to hassle to return. :)

As far as the risk goes, I'm in the stages of putting together a SFF secondary system. If the memory didn't work in the 680i, then it would simply have been used in mATX board.
 
Mansize_tissue said:
I'm surprised to hear how well it's running with a 680i board, let's hope it lasts! Have you run memtest yet? Oh, and your sig still says 4GB- 'don't want to flaunt your extra e-peen?

On an unrelated note, how's your TJ09? I don't know whether or not to buy one.
Click to expand...

No memtest yet - I stress my system enough with encoding and such that if it's flakey, it will blow up in no time. So far, so good. However I actually pulled three sticks of memory out (down to 2gb) as I need to use MCE to record some stuff this weekend. 4gb and above makes MCE flake out in Vista X64, and there is not a fix out yet for that problem. Nice huh?

As for the TJ09, I love the case. It's roomy and very much quality. I do not like the HD cooling, it's very restrictive. I run all Scythe S-FLEX fans (49 and 63 CFM) in the case and it's very quiet. I also added the Scythe Kama bay to the upper three most 5-1/4" bays to pump a bit more cool air into the case. With all of the hardware I have in there, it's a small oven.
 
unixadm said:
Dan,

Everyone wonders why people do things, that's human nature. Why did I buy this freakin huge 37" Westy last weekend that I'm staring at? I dunno.. that was an impulse buy, but the ram was not. I have worked the past 12 years as a Solaris/Linux/Unix and heck even a Windows administrator. Now that I'm a bit older, I now manage a good team that deals with enterprise hardware on a daily basis. Part of my job right now is to move parts of the infrastructure my team administrates to virtual servers. So I'm doing a lot of testing presently with multiple virtual machines, and those machines consume memory. Now since this is my primary desktop at home, I want it to perform reasonably well. Instead of running a PowerEdge server or something at my house, I'm just using my home system to test these migrations. To do that, I need memory to prevent the OS from swapping out. I triple boot Ubuntu X64, Vista X64, and Windows XP X64 depending on what I'm doing. I have a fairly high end home computer, and I'm in a financial position that I can buy pretty much whatever I'd like within reason. So $200 for 4gb of memory is not a huge ding to my overall budget. So while some people may buy other add-ons and accessories for various reasons, I had a use for more memory. That's why I run 64bit operating systems in the first place.

So the 8gb wasn't for an e-penis extension or anything. When I'm done with my testing, I can use that memory in another system. I've paid $300 for 1gb of memory, so $200 for 4gb seemed like a great deal. To top it off, Frys.com being the poor company they are failed to cancel my other order which was for the 4gb dual kit that was back-ordered. I gave them over a week to cancel it and it STILL shipped yesterday. So now I have another 4gb showing up that I'll have to hassle to return. :)

As far as the risk goes, I'm in the stages of putting together a SFF secondary system. If the memory didn't work in the 680i, then it would simply have been used in mATX board.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the explanation. I was merely curious. I bought another 2GB of PC2-9200 memory myself to go to 4GB, not because I needed it but because I wanted it. Unfortunately it didn't work out as my motherboard doesn't like having 4 sticks of that stuff in there. I can probably make it work but I'd have to reduce the clock speed from 1142MHz to 800MHz and I don't want to do that. I'd rather use my memory at the SLI EPP settings that it was intended to operate at. If I ever decide to go to 4GB then I'll grab a 4GB kit with two modules in it like you did.
 
Dan_D said:
Thanks for the explanation. I was merely curious. I bought another 2GB of PC2-9200 memory myself to go to 4GB, not because I needed it but because I wanted it. Unfortunately it didn't work out as my motherboard doesn't like having 4 sticks of that stuff in there. I can probably make it work but I'd have to reduce the clock speed from 1142MHz to 800MHz and I don't want to do that. I'd rather use my memory at the SLI EPP settings that it was intended to operate at. If I ever decide to go to 4GB then I'll grab a 4GB kit with two modules in it like you did.
Click to expand...

Yep, some of us need lot of memory.
Look at my sig. :)

That server will soon be upgraded to 2x quad-cores + another 16GB (32GB of ram total).
All this in a server I am using at home. :eek:
 
spectrumbx said:
Yep, some of us need lot of memory.
Look at my sig. :)

That server will soon be upgraded to 2x quad-cores + another 16GB (32GB of ram total).
All this in a server I am using at home. :eek:
Click to expand...

You running a home based business off of that thing?
 
Dan_D said:
You running a home based business off of that thing?
Click to expand...

Kind of. :)

My work involves developing memory intensive applications.
The server hosts:
- virtualized clusters of distributed memory intensive applications
- virtualized servers for my consulting business
- virtualized software development environments
- virtualized test machines and sandboxes
- file server

All that in a single physical hardware.
Pretty sweet huh? :cool:
 
spectrumbx said:
Kind of. :)

My work involves developing memory intensive applications.
The server hosts:
- virtualized clusters of distributed memory intensive applications
- virtualized servers for my consulting business
- virtualized software development environments
- virtualized test machines and sandboxes
- file server

All that in a single physical hardware.
Pretty sweet huh? :cool:
Click to expand...

Well I've setup plenty of VMs, I just didn't know what you might be doing with that particular box at home but I suspected virtual machines were part of it.
 
Dan_D said:
Good luck using 4 sticks of memory on non-Intel chipset based motherboards. As far as you not being able to do so on the P965 from DFI, well that just screams of DFI poorly implementing things on thier side. I can run four of virtually any module in my P5W DH.
Click to expand...

I run 4x2GB on my DFI 680i no problems. 5-5-5-12 2T
 
Spazilton said:
I run 4x2GB on my DFI 680i no problems. 5-5-5-12 2T
Click to expand...

Yeah but at what clockspeed? If you are running 2GB modules they aren't likely rated for more than PC2-6400 speeds. (Though there are a few modules out there that are rated for higher clocks.)

Much of the time any modules rated to go over PC2-6400 specs need to be clocked down to 800MHz or 667MHz to work in groups of four. That's for just 1GB modules. For 2GB modules, I suspect that it might be easier because they will typically have lower clock speed ratings and worse timings.
 
Note that if you install Vista x64, you need to start with 2GB, install the whole OS, and then download a patch from Microsoft - KB929777 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929777), and then you can up the RAM to 4GB. This is because the 680i boards have a 32 bit ACPI controller. Only Microsoft could fuck up the ability of a 64 bit OS to boot with 4GB of RAM.
 
gnf said:
Note that if you install Vista x64, you need to start with 2GB, install the whole OS, and then download a patch from Microsoft - KB929777 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929777), and then you can up the RAM to 4GB. This is because the 680i boards have a 32 bit ACPI controller. Only Microsoft could fuck up the ability of a 64 bit OS to boot with 4GB of RAM.
Click to expand...

This is good information. I hadn't seen this before. I wouldn't have even thought to blame Microsoft for this issue.
 
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