RAM Stops pc from booting.

[Helixeagle]

Hey guys,

I have never had problems with RAM in the past, but recently I purchased 4x 512mb 3200 ECC RAM from crucial, when I put it in a built from scratch pc, it doesn’t boot. No beeps and no monitor... only the fans spin and the lights come on, I quickly diagnosed this as the ram, using my current RAM (512MB 2700 Non-ECC) and it boots fine.

The only difference with the two sticks of RAM other than the speed is the ECC, could this be the problem? As I have never purchased ECC before and I seem to remember it relates to servers in someway, also the chips on the ram seem smaller and more compact (this may be normal though)

Yes the mobo defiantly supports 3200 speeds and I've tried a variety of things, I need to build this pc for someone and this is the first time I've come across this type of problem, also the motherboard is fine as putting no ram in creates several beeps indicating no ram. Any help would be much appreciated.

-Mike

 

[Nodsu]

Does the motherboard support ECC RAM? You can't put ECC into something that doesn't support it.

 

[Helixeagle]

Thats what I was thinking, In all my years of pc's I have never had a problem with RAM but I also don't believe I have ever received ECC RAM before hence I was not aware that motherboards needed support for it. I will check tonight thanks alot.

 

[TangoTrolly]

EEC stands for Error Correcting Circuitry. Nodsu is correct, in that it requires special chipset support. In addition it requires a setting in the BIOS program to be enabled.