Been fighting this all weekend. Having major RAM issues with the quad. I bought another 4GB of ram to up my total to 8GB. Unfortunately I still have DDR2, so I had to buy 2x2GB sticks. This means that all 4 of my slots are now filled. It seems that motherboards are a bit fussy when all 4 slots are used up.
I've tried upping the voltage on the RAM and upping the voltage on the chipset.
The problem is I have no idea when its actually "stable". I've been getting file corruption issues since I installed the ram but I have no idea when they were caused. I thought I had it completely stable, even running Prime95 and Intel Burn Test multiple times without any issues. But I then got a "No entry point" error running Premiere and another corrupted wallpaper.
I've tried the new ram by itself, in slots 0 and 2, and that seemed to work ok. But I didn't memtest it very long. I tried the old ram in slots 1 and 3, and that didn't allow the motherboard to POST at all.
I would think this is something bad, but it could just be that its not designed to run with memory in those 2 slots only ( though the motherboard manual mentions that configuration as valid). It could be that those 2 slots are just not quite good.
I've gone back to Square 1. I've put everything back to stock. All 4 are in, running at DDR800, with stock voltages. I've been running Memtest for the past few hours, and so far no errors. This is a bit distressing because I know this configuration before caused windows not to load properly. This may mean that memtest just cannot detect the errors ( or the errors aren't memory related).
Update: So memtest cannot find the error. I ran it for about 3 hours. Which isn't much for memtest, but it was enough to get full coverage once. It passed fine. I rebooted into windows to make sure I was still seeing the errors and as soon as I did, stuff would refuse to load, and programs crashed. So
I'm thinking this isn't a memory issue at all. Its a chipset issue.
I've upped the chipset voltage to +.150V. I also overclocked the processor a bit to 2.8Ghz ( from 2.6). I probably shouldn't do that, but its annoying me now, so I figure why not.
I've run Prime95+ for about 18 hours, and it was fine. Now I'm trying Intel Burn Test 10x to see how that goes. I haven't seen any file corruption in the wallpapers, so I'm hoping if this gets through IBT. I can call it stable and just reinstall windows again to get rid of the file corruption.
Update 2: So IBT returned an error. It said that it might be because of instability or UAC. I tried upping the voltage a bit more, but it turned yellow and wouldn't POST. So I kept the voltage at +.175 ( I was wrong before it wasn't at .150) and upped the FSB one notch up. Now I'm rerunning IBT, as administrator and seeing how things are going.