RAM Weirdness

[houseisland]

I have an HP dc7100.

I have four 1Gb strips of Buffalo Select DDR 400.

Each strip tests OK in the system. Any three strips together will test OK in the system. And yes... this is days of testing.

Put the fourth strip in and MemTest crashes about 8 minutes and 30 seconds into the test, and the system is frozen.

Ok, so quite rightly you are thinking it might be the fourth socket that is the problem, but no..... I can put other RAM in secondary pair of slots and it is OK. I put other RAM in the primary slots and the Buffalo RAM in the secondary slots and it is OK.

Ok, so you are thinking that maybe the system doesn't like 4 Gb of RAM. But no... it works just fine with 4 Gb of RAM from other manufacturers. It works fine with 4 Gb of RAM as long as not more than three of the strips are the Buffalo RAM.

I have used the Buffalo RAM to upgrade a number of older systems because it is cheap and because generally there are few problems with it. I have had no problems with it in SIS, Via, and nVidia chipset systems.

Recently I have had problems with it in HP Intel chipset boxes. The dc7100 herein discussed, and with my FrankenPC Windows Home Server, where the RAM seemed not to like the slightly higher voltages from the new PS in the box.

Weird.

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