Old School DDR conundrum. Help?

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Buztafen

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 19, 2005
Messages
238
Ok, so a friend has an old eMachines 5250 pc which is a basic Pentium 4 comp with just 2 x 256mb of DDR400 Ram in it.

She wanted to make it faster so i found her 2 sticks of 512mb DDR400 (Elixir) to either add to the RAM she's already got or replace to make a competent 1gb Internet pc...except the computer doesnt seem to like the it.

The computer randomly reboots and sometimes doesnt even post. As soon as i put the original memory back in all is fine?

Ive tested the ram using Memtest and it seems fine. Ive also used a different set of DDR 400 (Crucial) and had the same result. I cant figure out why it doesnt like the extra ram? To all intents and purposes its exactly the same RAM, DDR400 CL3 etc. Are there other subtle differences which i need to take into account?

The only thing i can think of is that maybe its drawing too much power? The PSU's a generic 300w job but surely adding just 1gb of memory wont up the power drain that much.

Any ideas?
 
Does your bios let you see and adjust the memory voltage and timings? if so what does it report with the old sticks and what does it report with the new sticks.
 
The BIOS is very simple and most options are greyed out and locked. I had a search to see if theres a way to unlock it but found some other useful info. Apparently the mobo's a bit picky about what RAM it works with and only seems to like 'low density' memory. Have ordered some to see if it works.

Cheers.
 
I've found that some DDR400/PC3200 memory is reported as being slower by programs like CPU-Z. Also some motherboards can't run memory reliably at its full rated speed if too many modules are installed at once, but their BIOSes are supposed automatically switch to slower timings to prevent that problem.

I doubt the power supply is at fault, unless it's defective, because the additional memory will increase the load by only a few watts, and the old Dell Optiplex GX270 with 2.8 GHz Northwood Pentium 4 ran fine with just a 250W PSU (but it was a really good PSU from Delta or HiPro), at least if no high-power graphics card was installed. I think by the time the Pentium 4 came out, eMachines had switched to good quality power supplies, but I once saw an eMachines at Wal-mart or CompUSA equipped with a PowMax (really bad).

I think it will be safer to upgrade by using only a pair of 1GB DDR400 sticks. The Corsair ValueRAM that Fry's has frequently offered for $10-15 per GB, after rebate, should work OK, but 1 out of 3 sets I tried failed on me (test like crazy).
 
Two questions:

1) Did you try running without the old RAM in place?
2) Is it Dual Channel? If it is you need to put the matching sticks in the 1st and 3rd slot and 2nd and 4th slot.

The reason I ask about Dual Channel is that P4 is around when they started messing around with that. I know you might have tried those but wanted to add my $.02
 
Are you sure the mobo supports sticks greater than 256mb? We have some pc's at work that the biggest ddr sticks they support are 256mb.
 
I've worked on a lot of P4/DDR machines, and I find that a lot of the time they are just really picky when it comes to what memory will work and what won't. One thing you could try is going to Crucial's website and running the RAM Adviser. Usually they will tell you what types it can handle and what will work.
 
maybe the memory is high density and the pc doesnt like that type?
 
yeah, sounds like it's high-density RAM... the cheaper motherboards used by PC manufacturers typically don't like HD RAM chips... Look for low density RAM, they'll probably have twice as many chips on them when comparing them to the ones you have but don't work. Often the High Density sticks are single-sided...
 
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