Vengeance memory not playing nice with older EVGA board

[gr2]

Hi,

I have an older x58 EVGA motherboard, it's a 141-BL-E760-A1 that I wanted to upgrade the memory on.

Old memory: 6x 2GB Corsair XMS3 from here: https://www.newegg.com/corsair-12gb-240-pin-ddr3-sdram/p/N82E16820145235
New memory: 6x 4GB Corsair Vengeance from here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004UPTEH6/

Now according to the owner's manual, the mother board page 19, there is a 4GB per stick cap, and the slots are DDR3.
Also according to the mother board manual, page 9, "Supports triple channel DDR3-1600+. Supports up to 24GBs DDR3 memory"
So we don't seem to be violating the mother board's max capacity in any way.

The sticks are also very common in terms of specs. Both are 9-9-9-24 timing, both are rated for 1600Mhz. They slightly differ though because the old memory is rated for 1.6v and the new memory 1.5v, though I don't think this should make any difference.

Given all of this I expected an easy swap upgrade, but not happening. With all 6 of the new memory sticks plugged in, the motherboard won't POST, or it will (beep), but will immediately freeze right after, unable to even get to the BIOS.

It WILL, however, POST on only 3 sticks, plugged in to the appropriate configuration for 3 sticks according to the manual page 19 (slots 1, 3, 5 (red)). BIOS then shows all 12GB. I first said "this must be a bad stick of RAM", but I cycled the remaining 3 sticks through and it POSTS just fine with all 6 sticks at different times, so it's seemingly not bad RAM. It's not a bad DIMM slot either because the old config uses all 6 DIMM slots, which is what I'm using now.

The BIOS auto detect seems really iffy on reading the specs from the sticks, it guesses some odd timing that may be too quick like 7-7-7-17, 1.70v, and 1033Mhz. I've tried forcing all of these to 9-9-9-24, 1.5v, and 1600Mhz separately, doesn't fix. I've also tried liberal settings like 11-11-11-30, 1033Mhz, 1.7v, still not working, so the issue doesn't seem to be in the BIOS at all, and the auto detect was working fine with the old memory.

Only thing I can think of is that maybe it's some sort of issue that doesn't reveal itself with 3 sticks unless it's under load? I'll have to try memtest with 3 sticks in 2 batches to see if it can find any issues.

Anybody have any ideas? I thought I bought compatible memory but maybe I did not? Am I misunderstanding something about my motherboard's capabilities? Thanks in advance.

 

[gr2]

Just a follow-up to this: I ran memtest, I did 2 full passes on 3x of the sticks, and 1.25 passes on the other 3x of the sticks. 0 errors. So there's still no reason for me to believe new ram is defective.

Really have no idea what's going on, it's acting as if I have too much memory installed, but the specs say it should be fine. I tried mis-matching it with the older sticks (I know you're not supposed to), with new in 1st channel and old memory in 2nd channel, this also failed the same way, although I don't think that was a valid test.

I've dusted, blew out, reseated, about 1 million times, no changes. 1, 3, 6 sticks old = boot; 3 sticks new = boot; 6 sticks new = fail.

Got no idea what's going on here :-\.

 

[Psychonic]

I'll throw in my 2 cents.

Reseating the CPU has often "fixed" ram issues on these older boards, especially when ram is not being seen on particular slots. Also, you will want to have both 8 pin power ports plugged in between the rear I/O ports and the CPU. It's possible there is a voltage issue if you don't have both 8 pin power connectors plugged in. Check page 19 in the user manual, it shows which ports to plug RAM into based on the number of RAM sticks you are plugging in. Try getting dual channel memory running with 4 sticks of the new RAM and then try for triple channel running based on the manual's population order. There appears to be a memory interleaving and rank interleave settings in the bios as well. Make sure that it is set correctly for each test when trying to get 2, 4 and finally 6 sticks working and try changing the rank as well.

Hope that helps!

 

[gr2]

I'll throw in my 2 cents.

Reseating the CPU has often "fixed" ram issues on these older boards, especially when ram is not being seen on particular slots. Also, you will want to have both 8 pin power ports plugged in between the rear I/O ports and the CPU. It's possible there is a voltage issue if you don't have both 8 pin power connectors plugged in. Check page 19 in the user manual, it shows which ports to plug RAM into based on the number of RAM sticks you are plugging in. Try getting dual channel memory running with 4 sticks of the new RAM and then try for triple channel running based on the manual's population order. There appears to be a memory interleaving and rank interleave settings in the bios as well. Make sure that it is set correctly for each test when trying to get 2, 4 and finally 6 sticks working and try changing the rank as well.

Hope that helps!

I have only 1 of the 8-pins plugged in right now. I'll see if I can find the other 8p wire (modular psu) and plug that in. All the voltages are stock, though, so I wouldn't think it's an issue. I was also only using 1 with the old memory.
I have indeed been mainly referencing page 19 for memory info. I tried 4 sticks of the new memory as specified in the manual (slots 1, 2, 3, 4) and that did not POST either, not quite sure what to make of that. I'll check the memory interleaving / rank interleave you mentioned for this and see if that helps, but the old memory was 6 sticks in a triple channel config so I don't think this is what's blocking the main situation (all 6 sticks of new memory).
For triple channel that's how I'm running it now, 3 sticks of new memory in slots 1, 3, 5, as per the manual, and it works fine.

So in short:
- I'll look for a 2nd 8p cable, but the single 8p was running 6 DIMM's of the old memory with 1 w/o issues; all voltages stock
- Dual channel config with 4 sticks of new fails to POST
- Triple channel config with 3 sticks old/new boots, 6 sticks new fails to POST. 6 sticks of old memory works fine.
- I'll try messing with the interleaving settings

 

[gr2]

Interleaving settings were correct.
2nd 8p didn't fix this.

I was actually able to resolve this issue yesterday by updating the BIOS. The latest BIOS is still from 2011 or some long time ago, but I guess what I had was even earlier than that. All 24gb show up in memtest & Windows now.