Why Is It Always Like This?

So I assembled Haruhi and Yurie last night.  That went pretty smoothly.  I didn't slip while tightening a screw and gouge a hole in the motherboard.  I didn't short anything out, and I only plugged one thing in backwards (the HDD LED on one machine).  Both machines POSTed first try, a huge improvement over last year's effort at building a small media center box, which never worked at all and was eventually scavenged for parts.

So, as I say, they POSTed fine, so I did what comes naturally and ran Memtest86.  The resulting explosion was so violent that I'll be picking bits and bytes out of the ceiling for weeks.  I've never seen Memtest86 actually crash before.

Funny thing, though.  It crashed on both machines, no matter which of the 6 dimms I used.  As a quick test I popped in the Fedora 8 Live CD, and it booted up just fine.  Hmm.  I then tried installing Vista, and that went just fine too.

Until I installed the video drivers from Gigabyte, anyway.  Then it all went haywire.

A bit more poking around showed that the memory was running at 868MHz.  That's not a big overclock, but it's cheap memory, so maybe that was the problem.  So I went into the bios to change the timing settings...  And there weren't any.  Nothing.  Nada.

So I downloaded the latest bios update, put it on a flash drive, and installed it.  (That's something they got right, at least.  No more floppies!)  Still no overclocking settings, and I know I saw some in a review before I decided on this motherboard.  I'm not that fussed about overclocking, but it's handy to have that extra control just in case something goes insane.

So, a bit more poking around, and I find that you have to hit Ctrl-F1 on the main bios screen to access the hidden overclocking settings.  There's no fine-grain control over memory clocks (though you can control all the little details like CAS and RAS delays down to the nanosecond), but setting the clock to 667MHz showed up as 748MHz in Memtest86+.

Oh, forgot to mention.  Memtest86 explodes on sight.  Memtest86+ seems to work fine.  It did find a couple of errors while running at 868MHz, so I restarted it after downclocking the ram.  So far, so good.

It's possible also that the screwy video is connected to the screwy ram timings.  I can test that out too.  If that works, then everything's peachy, except for Vista, which I will loathe for a good long time yet.

One side thought: If Microsoft sold for $100 a program that did one thing and one thing only - told Vista shut up, I know what I'm doing - their profits would be secure for the next five years.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:38 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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