Aopen AK79D 400VN motherboard Ram problems

[pantoonz]

Hello there!
I have an AK79D 400VN motherboard with a bios from 28 Nov 2003. I bought the board with the computer in March 2004.
My problem is that when I put more that 512 (one stick) of ram in the thing it crashes during Unreal 2004 (or any other intensive 3D game)...little beep and a black screen, only to be solved by pulling out AC and often resulting in a need to re-plug and play thge cd dvd drives as they can no longer be seen on re-boot.
I have tested the ram with a ram tester (no errors)and had someone look at the proccessor temp/ graphics card temp and they arnt getting too hot. I have the latest direct x 9 and the latest Nvidia drivers.
One stick of ram never crashes, two sticks and it takes a few minutes but three sticks and it falls over almost immediately.
System specs are
Athlon 3200
Nvidia geforce fx5950 256mb
sound card emu 1820
two 80 gig hard drive Maxtor
1.5 (potentially) gig ram. DDR-400 512 3208 GATA11-04A1 MD44512 PQP made by PMI (this is what is written on the ram stick anyway).
If anyone has any ideas I would be VERY grateful as this has been doing my head in ever since I bought it!
Many thanks
Peter

 

[howard_hopkinso]

Hello and welcome to Techspot.

I have just found this on your mobo manufacturers website.

This motherboard supports industrial standard DDR400 modules, but since a lot of DDR400 modules have had been shipped before the standard announced. It is highly possible some modules may have compatibility problem with this motherboard.

We would like to recommend two tips:

1. nVidia nForce2 chipset can support DDR400 only when integrated (on-chip) VGA controller is disabled.
2. If you are not sure whether your DDR400 module complies with industrial standard or not, we recommend you to use maximum two DDR400 DIMMs only.

The recommended memory list website link address as below.
http://club.aopen.com.tw/testreport/mb/

I hope this helps.

Regards Howard

:wave: :wave:

 

[pantoonz]

thanks Howard! This seems like the probable cause...now to get the shop to replace it!
Thanks again for your quick reply
Peter

 

[pantoonz]

Hello again!
How do I disable the on chip VGA controller? Is that somerthing I need to enter the bios to do?
Peter

 

[howard_hopkinso]

Yes you will need to go into bios in order to disable the onboard vga.

Regards Howard :grinthumb