[Cialug] New Computer Hardware Issue

[Major Stubble]

Nate,

Nothing that is official.  Has more to do with past experiences and  
purchasing trends.

Most home builders will go with sticks manufactured by Crucial, OCZ,  
or A-Data for 'value-priced' DDR2 performance.  In the 800Mhz kits,  
OCZ provides better bulk prices so you'll find places like Newegg or  
eWiz aggressively pricing 2GHz pairs with CAS 4 ratings.  Plus, OCZ's  
Platinum revision 2 sticks were released in the first quarter,  
dropping their Gold revision 2 stick prices.

Now, I like OCZ memory, but it suffers from one thing that Crucial,  
Buffalo, Mushkin, and Wintech don't.  They push hard for the early  
release date.  So, they will design their memory with higher voltage  
requirements based off pre-release reference boards.  So, every now  
and then, a company like Asus or MSI will give them a pre-release  
reference board with the latest and greatest north-bridge, but change  
some of the specs before release to make the board more stable.

So, some poor home-brewer will get these good motherboards with a  
value-priced OCZ stick pair, not knowing that the SPD is outdated.   
OCZ's NF5 chipset, for example, needed the Tras set loose to allow  
the system to boot the first time. While the SPD reported to the BIOS  
to run at 5-5-5-12, the board needs to see an SPD with the Tras at 15  
for it to boot.

In the end, most times the solution is to hand-set the voltage (and  
sometimes the Tras).  However, you'll need to keep that cheap stick  
of memory handy - or flash the SPD for the memory (ugh!).  My  
solution of late has been to purchase Patriot, Buffalo, or Mushkin  
memory.  Corsair and Crucial memory are fine, but I have problems  
finding them with the lower CAS rating without the price being a full  
$20 more (per stick) than the competition.

My $.02.

-MS

On Dec 3, 2007, at 1:44 PM, Nathan C. Smith wrote:

>
>> If I were a betting man, I would say that you probably purchased an
>> AM2 motherboard and an DDR2-800 (PC2-6400).  I'll go even
>> further out on a limb and say you may have purchased OCZ memory?
>>
>
> Do you know something about OCZ memory that might be good to share?
>
> -Nate
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