I have a computer that I built about a year ago. I have a 780i mobo and 4 sticks of Crucial Ballistix (2 X 1gb) RAM. Today I reformatted my hard drive and started getting blue screened when trying to boot. I narrowed the problem down to my RAM. I had this problem before when I started building it and took it to GeekSquad and they said it had to do with putting the RAM in the right slots. I put the sticks of RAM in the exact slots that they had them but still getting the blue screen. During the boot on the black screen it says 4 DIMMs not supported. I now have 2 sticks in and it boots fine but if I try for 3 or more it will blue screen. Does anyone know why this might be and what I can do to fix it? I'm a total newbie if you can't tell. Thanks
it's probably a BIOS setting that need to be changed anyway, look at the DIMM sockets, there will be 2 different colors of DIMM's, each matched set of RAM (2 sticks) must be installed into the 2 DIMM sockets of the same color
Ah, yes, Crucial Ballistix. This RAM tends to love lots of airflow, and as premium stuff, you *might* need to use a little higher voltage than the 1.8V standard to DDR2. I believe you can safely go to 2.0V on most DDR2 sticks. If you haven't, download Memtest for a floppy or CD and boot off the media. Let it run for a few hours (overnight, if you can), and see if you get any errors. If you do, you'll need to yank sticks to narrow down which one is the culprit. I have heard some reports (mostly browsing [H]ard|Forum) about Ballistix DDR2 doing this stuff---like what happened with their Ballistix DDR1 stuff. If you have to send it back, Crucial is easy to deal with.
