Re: [gentoo-amd64] upgrade to 939 ~fx60 | am2 ~x2 5000+

[Brian Litzinger <brian@worldcontrol.com>]

On Sun, Jul 23, 2006 at 03:45:03PM +0200, Dieter Ries wrote:
> hi,
> 
> 
> currently i am running my gentoo on a 3000+ with 1g ram single channel.
> 
> are there support problems with am2 chipsets? which mb's are the best? how big 

I setup two systems using the Abit KN9 SLI motherboards.

http://www.abit-usa.com/products/mb/products.php?categories=1&model=315

It is AM2 and DDR2.  I had an Athlon X2 4200 cpu.

At first I tried using 800MHz Cosair memory.  But the system would
not boot.  Just beeped the BIOS beep of death.

I read on some of the gaming forums that others were having troubles
with this motherboard and running memories at their top rated speed.

As it is a gaming MB every last detail is configurable in the
BIOS. Others had success fine tuning the DRAM parameters for
the particular memory they had.

Others suggested running the memory at one notch below maximum.

I.E. 800 -> 667, 667 -> 540, and so on.

This latter trick worked for me.

The gamers report the system is quite reliable and I found the same
thing with RAM speed downgrade.

An interesting problem with running the memory below rated is
   how do you get started?

The BIOS defaults to 'DRAM speed by SPD', so if your 800MHz memory
doesn't work you can't get into the BIOS to change the settings.

The solution there is have some slow memory laying around to
boot and set the CMOS.

There where also cases (I tried lots of different memory) where
some memories would boot at their rated maximum but would fail
memtest86.

-- 
Brian Litzinger
-- 
gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list