System fails to boot when using new DIMM clocks exceeding 2400MHz
System fails to boot when using new DIMM clocks exceeding 2400MHz
My brother's system is as follows: Ryzen 5 3600X (stock speed, Wraith Spire cooler) MSI B550M Pro-VDH Wi-Fi eVGA RTX 2060 XC G.SKILL F4-3200C16S-16GVK Ripjaws V 16GB 3200MHz G.SKILL F4-3200C16S-16GVK Ripjaws V 16GB 3200MHz (I'll get to this) Intel 660p NVMe 512GB SSD Seagate ST2000DM008 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM SATA3 HDD The system was originally built with a single DIMM, and then was upgraded a couple of months later with a second DIMM (and the hard drive). In about April, the system started having issues - kernel panics, program crashes etc. A few MemTest runs later isolated the issue to a one-bit error in the second DIMM. Annoying, but at least it's covered under warranty. After waiting for the replacement to finally arrive in May we installed it and... it didn't POST. It definitely is new - it has a manufacturing date of May 2021. After we took it back to the store, the staff tested it in their testbench and it worked fine (though I don't know what system that is or with what settings). We took it back and tried resetting the BIOS, which we hadn't done before. Lo and behold, it booted just fine. After doing more thorough testing, including more MemTest runs, the first DIMM works fine (POST, loading GRUB, full MemTest) up to 3200MHz (we didn't try pushing it any further), but the second DIMM would work perfectly up to 2400MHz but fail to POST even the next speed higher (2666MHz) or any speed up to 3200MHz. During testing, we updated the BIOS from 2.00 to 2.80, reset BIOS settings again and reran our previous tests, but came to the same conclusion. At one point when removing and reinstalling the DIMMs, we noticed that while the old DIMM has DRAM chips on both sides, the replacement RAM has chips on just one side. I know as we saw in the recent video about RAM density that there can be a performance difference, but this DIMM isn't even achieving advertised clock speeds and timings. I have no idea whether this is relevant to the problem or not, but just putting it out there. I'm not 100% certain what I'm asking here. Could it be DRAM density? Is there a BIOS setting I should have changed? Am I just unlucky that the brand new DIMM is also faulty?
I need to keep this in mind. I’ll request a refund or exchange from the retailer that supplied this DIMM. Unfortunately, they don’t carry Flare X DIMMs in the 1x16GB size; they only have 2x8GB options. It’s proving tough to locate any 1x16GB 3200MHz models at this store for swapping. I’ve managed to find a few through online searches, but it’s much more challenging than expected when looking for a pure 1x16GB unit.