Testing a motherboard's ram slots

Hardware Motherboards
#1

 

Hi Tek,

just testing a asrock z77 pro4-m motherboard and I have been having some strange irregularities with RAM and thought I would ask around to see if anyone had encountered anything like this.

I am testing it with a 4 channel (confirmed 100% working) quad channel mushkin 16gb kit and when I populate all the sloots the bios reads the total memory as half and only registers the ram the second channel (slots a2 & b2). No amount of reseating or swapping affects this at all and when entering the "system browser" part of the uefi it clearly shows ram detected across all slots. So, I was thinking dead slots but curiously, if I take the ram out of slots a2 & b2 it registers the first 8gb of ram across channels a1&b1. when I then add a 3rd dimm to either a2 or b2 it either stops posting or stops registering the ram in slot b1 (still appearing in system browser but not registering the memory).

all this has been tested with both the xmp profiles set to auto and by manually entering the timing/freqency. although in the uefi under "load xmp settings" it only offers auto and "xmp 1.2 profile 1" rather an off which was what i was searching for.

So, yeah, anything else spring to mind by way of a test? other than just memtesting the dimms. I checked the pins on the board with my digital camera in macro and i couldn't see any pins awry. I also updated the bios as a last ditch effort before turning to you guys. What do you think?

#2

sounds like a bad memory controller. or the mobo just doesn't "like" the ram...

do you have another set of 4x4g ddr3, preferably g.skill?

#3

no spare quad channel kits around no, but plenty of dual channel so I will test one of them in conjunction with my existing quad kit, but I suspect you may be right about the memory controller so I do not hold out much hope. thanks for the help though.

#4

Your motherboard doesn't have quad channel memory, you just have 4 modules. The CPU is physically only capable of dual channel.

#5

yeah I know it is just a quad channel ram kit so its verified to work together. I know the board just has two dual channels, but only one of the dual channels appears to work at a time.