motherboard/ram issues

[madmonk888]

hey everybody

here's what i got and here's the problem

just bought a winchester amd athlon 64 3500+ socket 939 cpu
and MSI k8T Neo2 board

now . i have had 2 PC2700 512 MB nunya?! generic ram sticks from before

everything works fine except that the ram is detected only as 512MB in windows XP
so... i tried to test the ram by removing each one .. tricky thing is .. now it desplayed 256 megs of ram.. so its reading the sticks at half. there are 2 banks in eachs slots
2 green 2 purple... i have both sticks in the green slots.. i figured if i put one in the purple slot, it will read the whole ramstick... but it wont boot AT all when anything is in the purple slots.
this however, is a common problem i guess, has to do with motherboard bios or something.. so next thing on the list ... we have to re-flash MOBO
i dont know why, but my computer isnt reading the disk drive.. tried 2 different floppy drives .. and nothing works .. so i thought id make a CDrom boot disk with Nero.. i put floppy emulation, as that is the only way i can seem to get it to boot from cdrom..
everything was fine.. however .. when i tried to flash ... by typing in exactly what they said .. like "flashutil <romname> ( i have AMI bios) " it would give me a list of options but id be back at the dosprompt .. if i tried to type in the flashutil romname /option .. same thing .. would display the options in a /? dos manner but no flashing of rom
i was thinking about doing liveupdate and do a windows Flash..but i read somewhere that thats not a good thing because it might mess up the flash completely...
any ideas on why the ram wouldnt be read correctly ? or how to flash the bios ?

thanks for any input

madmonk

 

[Nubius]

Aright a couple things to clarify for ya. Those difference in colors on your RAM slots are for Dual Channel RAM, you have two have two identicle sticks to be able to run in Dual Channel...and even if you have to identicle sticks sometimes, if it's seperately bought sticks of generic brand it won't work in Dual Channel which is probably what's happening to you and why your computer won't boot up is because the RAM doesn't want to run in Dual Channel. When you see memory that comes in 'kits' like a 1gb kit is 2 sticks of 512mb and it says 'Dual Channel Memory' what it means is those two sticks were specifically designed and tested to be guaranteed to run in dual channel whereas generic RAM is not...

This is going to sound like a stupid question, but are you SURE you don't have two sticks of 256mb because I have never once heard of a computer reading half the capactiy of the sticks, especially a socket 939 motherboard at that...

Also windows based flashing is generally somewhat iffy, but I've done it 5 times in a row within an hour with no problems so it seems like that'd be your best bet, not only that, but I've used MSI's live update and it works.

Your best bet is to not choose 'Automatically Update' or whatever, you need to choose the right BIOS and try an 'Update from File' option so that you actually select the BIOS instead of the computer connecting to the server and downloading a BIOS, this is where most of the windows based flashing goes bad, but if you do it like I said you should have no problems.

 

[madmonk888]

LOL@ not sure if i have 2 sticks of 256.. yah last night i switched the mobo/cpu from my old athlon 2800 XP/asus crap mobo.. i mean .. i know for a fact i have 2 sticks of 512.... and here is the forum where i read up on the problem
http://www.techsupportforum.com/showthread.php?p=99242
except that i cant flash in dos for some reason the app doesnt work.. and for sure i dont want to use a beta bios
thnx for info nubius, so basically what youre saying is .. try windows update? heh .. gotta think about that first .. i read up on MSI page not to mess with it because it will kill your board
but if anyone here has MSI k8T board and has flashed before.. pls give me a sign =D

thnx for input =D

 

[madmonk888]

UPDATE:

whew.. i flashed it in windows after many frustrating dos flash attempts.. it ran fine .. now the motherboard detects the correct ammount of ram 1gig running at 157.9 .. im assuming thats relatively correct right ? 333 FSB pc2700?

btw.. thnx nubius for info, if ya didnt tell me to flash in windows i would have had to wait till monday to call MSI

now i just have to change sig =D