It seems my server has enjoyed playing silly buggers with me for the last 6 months. Originally it only had 2GB RAM, and with Windows 7 that's not really enough to have a nice experience with it. 4GB is plenty however, so I decided it was time to up the ram to 4GB. To do that I bought another identical stick of memory to put along side the current 2GB. For the first few days it was all well and dandy, the server speed was much improved.

One day a friend brings his new 2TB drive around to copy some files from me. A few minutes into copying, the server resets. Odd. We carry on copying and it does it again, and then a 3rd time. We gave up thinking the drive was faulty. Turns out it wasn't, it was my server, only I didn't know that yet.

A few days more passed and the server was fine, then one morning I'm eating breakfast and it resets itself for no apparent reason. I give it the benefit of the doubt on the off chance, but over the next week it happened 3 more times. I ran Prime95 that evening and it showed hardware errors, and even reset again. I decided to RMA the new stick of memory and go back to 2GB while it's replaced. While on 2GB the server ran fine, reaching uptimes of over a week no worries, and no Prime95 errors.

On Monday the new 2GB stick arrives, so I stick it in and run Prime95 to see if it has hardware errors. It did... Oh joy. I left it in anyway as I was busy doing other things. This morning I'm sat eating breakfast and just as I get up to make my lunch for work, it resets again. SCREW YOU THEN. This time I wondered if it was the motherboard causing the issue. Surely I can't have all the back luck and get bad RAM all the time. To test that theory I removed the known good 2GB stick and put the new 2GB stick in the slot the good RAM came out of. Off I go to work. When I got there I set Prime95 running. It ran all day up until I got home. No errors.

So that concludes the motherboard is to blame here, not the memory. It's strange though because this isn't a cheap board (ASUS P5Q Deluxe). Sadly it's out of warranty so I'll have to out-right replace it with a new one. It's annoying more than anything because up until now it's been a very reliable machine. I guess that's what I get for using desktop grade hardware for a server eh?

Anyway, the worst part of all this is there aren't many slot 775 boards being sold anymore because of the Core-i series coming to the market. My usual supplier, ebuyer, don't do any decent slot 775 motherboards now. All I need are 6 SATA slots and 4 RAM slots for future upgrading. Everything else can be whatever it wants to be. No VGA or sound? No worries, I don't use either, plus I have a crappy 4MB graphics card I can use for setting up.

Now my hunt for a new board continues. eBay doesn't seem to have any P5Q Deluxes otherwise I'd snap one of those up straight away.

For now, the server will continue to run, albeit with 2GB RAM in the known good slot. Pray that one doesn't go bad...

Too bad you have been in this trouble

I will try to find for you an Motherboard module that fits your needs.

http://misco.co.uk/applications/categor ... =0&Recs=10

Anything there? There's a few with 4x DDR2 slots, but most of them tend to have 4x SATA ports. If you needed to, you could like get a PCI-E SATA card (just make sure you don't get a cheap one).

Also, DDR2 or 3? You never specified.

Oh boy, I have that same board and sometimes the hard drive had seizures and lots of errors. Changed SATA ports and it's good now but the board still seems to make the PC act weird. Please don't be the RAM next, I feared of a dead hard drive.

Matt, it's DDR2. I'd prefer only to buy from a reputable place. I've never heard of that site.

Well for your information it is reputable. I've used it before many times, got my brother's laptop from there, got some parts for building a friends paretns computer, etc. They don't always use Royal Mail, which isn't a bad thing.

Perhaps reputable was the wrong word. What I mean is somewhere that a lot of people use, such as ebuyer and the likes.

So you're afraid to try somewhere else because you don't know anyone who's used it. Right...
It's called shopping around. So eBuyer doesn't have what you want, you don't tend to stop there because you don't want to go to a different shop because you've heard nothing about it. Just saying.

Even if you're not going to buy from Misco, there might be a motherboard there which would be suitable, all you then have to do is look it up and find it elsewheres, possibly cheaper. I really just provided an alternative list.

One thing I will say, a lot of 775 boards have 4xSATA. I've like only seen two with 6xSATA

I don't like buying online unless I know they're highly reputable. That's why I've stuck with ebuyer until now. There's nothing worse than buying online, receiving it late, finding it doesn't work and the not being able to send it back. It happens.

Anyway I'm going to quit while I'm ahead. You're obviously too annoyed to talk without insults.

Sorry, that last post wasn't meant to indicate insults. I was just trying to wonder why you were a little skeptical of going off the beaten track. To be honest, I can understand that, as per what you said. Misco tend to be more aimed at businesses than home user, which is probably why you've never really heard of it. They are good though.

Edit: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=17132

Andy, just try Rioter's Suggestions, or find your local Computer store and shop there. That's all I can really say, unless oyu want something specific, then I could be a little assist for you.

I had a little discussion with Andy on WLM, we've seem to have found an ideal one which looks good.

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Componen ... ctId=36810

Argh, I didn't have a good experience with ASRock boards, 2 died on me but good luck anyway

My asrock board has lasted a good 6 years and still going strong, is a 754pin AMD board though.

The P5N-D is still being sold at Newegg for around $70. I have it, and it works great with my C2D.

I've got a dead ASRock Prescott board, but at the same time I have another Gigabyte board with the same chipset that is dead also.

Anyways, I guess you're ram luck is as good as mine. I just found out that one of my ECC ram modules are bad so instead of having 2 Gb or ram in my backup system I only have one since the board will work with only ECC ram installed in pairs.

how about the second option: put a 4GB RAM stick into the working slot. of course if the board supports it.

Do you know of memtest86?

Much the same here I'm afraid. On one, a Skt754, the SATA controller literally burnt out, and both it and a Skt 775 died within two years from new.


I doubt Andy wants to pay out more money on RAM. 4Gb DDR2 sticks aren't cheap. A replacement motherboard would be cheaper.

I just has same problem with my PC
I thing first it was PSU problem (Generic psu)
Then i buy new Thermaltake PSU and it still had reset unexpected reason.
I try to RMA Motherboard and wait for 2 months. My PC back, i use for gaming for an 1 day.
Nezt day, it had got same problem again
WTF!!! I wait for 2 months and broken again!!
I think i need money to buy new motherboard. And i got same proble, its hard to find LGA775 Motherboard.
So, i think i will rebuild My PC again.

Since you said you bought an identical stick of 2GB, I assume you currently only have 2 sticks - meaning you should have 2 slots free (I haven't seen P5Q Deluxe, but I'd be surprised if it only had 2 slots). Have you tried using the other two slots, or even populating 2 neighbouring slots (which would force the memory to work in single-channel mode, but it'd still be better than just using 2GB)?

Thats a well thought out motherboard, space for a GPU fan instead of loosing a PCI-e/PCI port.

Wonder why does the server keep failing... best of luck to Andy, I appreciate your drive setup as much as I do mrpijey's (not kidding)

Yeah, I feel your pain. I used to have a cheap ol' Biostar 128M. One day I start my computer, and it's fans and everything run, but nothing's on the monitor, and the hard-disks don't rumble (yeah, my computer isn't too acoustically insulated). So I open it up and start it, and it's obvious the computers just sitting, doing nothing. So now I have a new MB, (more expensive and compatible with AM3) and I decided to get a Arctic Cooling CPU cooler (it's really quiet and cool), and a 750W PSU. That's the good part of parts breaking, it gives you an excuse to get some extra cool stuff.

Sorry for bump, but I'm not good at ASRocks either.

My server has a socket A board by ASRock (according to a review, the slowest board back when it was released!) which won't find my 256mb RAM stick, can't overclock without failing to boot, has a VIA chipset (and everyone knows VIAs tend to be a bit slower than normal, but it's got DDR266+SDRAM133 support) and from time to time can't run at full DDR frequency.
It doesn't end there - the same review said that the SDRAM slot makes the system unstable, means it's unable to run any decent benchmark.