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Asus Striker II Formula motherboards or other ROG with more than 2 gig RAM?

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by neon samurai

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I've a spiffy Striker II Formula motherboard. Based on the qualified vendor list for RAM, it seems that the board will not take more than 2 gig of 1066 mhz or 4 gig of 800 mhz RAM. Has anyone else found this to be an issue or a stable way around it?

With 1066 mhz ram, the board is not spec'd to use more than two of the four ram slots.

With 800 mhz ram, the board can make use of all four ram slots.

With 1066 mhz ram underclocked to 800 mhz, the board becomes more flakey than a box of day old pastries. This leaves me with two usable 1066 mhz 1 gig Crucial Balistix and two of the same back in the blister packaging.

Personally, I'm dumbfounded that a motherboard meant for professional gamers and meant to be run with 64bit multiple core processors (Q6600 on my board) can't make use of all ram slots and remain stable and is not qualified for more than four gig of 800 mhz ram. Vista 64bit alone is looking at 1~3 gig of ram for the kind of heavy workload I normally put on my Linux platforms; host OS + 1~3 running VM and whatever other tasks I have on the go.

4 gig of ram will at least give me a bit of use of the system until I can eventually replace the motherboard when budget permits again. Has anyone out there tried a pair of 2 gig 1066 chips with this motherboard?

21 replies

by oh smeg

I have several ABit and Gigabyte M'Boards that do exactly the same thing. I've found that as all of these M'Boards will accept 8 GIG of RAM that with 2 X 2GIG Sticks they work a treat but simply fail to boot when more than 2 RAM Slots are in use.

Change the RAM Speed and you can use all 4 RAM Slots but they are no where near as reliable as they where with a smaller RAM Load. Of course the M'Board manuals are as useful as T1TS on a Bull. :D

I've also got a ASUS M'Board here that needs to have the SATA Raid Controller turned on in BIOS but that setting isn't there either. Really useful it is to I might add. :(

Col

by rob miners

did they forget to put it in the silly duffers. I wonder if a BIOS Flash would cure it. :D

by oh smeg

Or maybe they are using the BIOS Features from an older M'Board Chip Set type but in the case of this M'Board BIOS with the latest BIOS Flash there is no way to enable the RAID Function on this M'Board. The Owners Manual quite clearly says that this has to be enabled in BIOS to work and there is no setting in BIOS to change. :D

I've got the same thing with an ABit AW8 Max Board as well. Not only does that not work with all 4 RAM Sockets populated but it refuses to work with any new Dual Core CPU's which it's supposed to support. And the RAID Function fails to work with that either. Bit of a nuisance but as this one is mine I can live with it as I was never going to use the RAID to begin with. But I did discover this when I was looking at Tammy Question on using Vista 32 Virtually. I thought well I'll use this one to give it a try to see what happens and the answer was Nothing as the RAID couldn't be configured. I had to use a New M'Board that was going out for a new sale as a test rig for that and it was a little over the top in it's configuration when I tested it with Vista 64 Loaded and 2 500 GIG Seagate SATA Drives. I had to pull the drives and clone the required OS to them after I had a play with the 32 Bit version of Vista running Virtually on a 64 Bit version of Vista both being the Ultimate copies. I only had less than a day to play with that setup to see if I could configure it to a way that it worked well for me to recommend it. :(

OH well I suppose I'll have more than enough time to play with Vista when it eventually starts to be used by business though it would be nice if they started using something that actually worked the way that it is sold. ;)

But I'll admit Vista 64 worked a treat on Mindvira 2008 with VM Ware. :p

Col

by neon samurai

I figured my case fell within the "encase of issues, install the latest bios update" recommendation from Asus. BIOS is a little more solid and has wider hardware support but didn't help the RAM issues and SATA RAID is not of use on this machine. For my NAS box, I'll either be getting an appliance or using a homebuilt box which will use RAID though the first option means hotswap SATA.

(now.. to get my income up to the range where I can afford a rack at home. ;) )

by neon samurai

Cheers, I have tested that also. Four 1066 sticks set at 800 mhz. It ran stable for an 8 day up time with 5 days on a hosted VM but broke under my last test; a wpa2 .cap file of my own wifi traffic which hit the motherboard's breaking point in a day and a half. With only two slots in use at 1066, I was able to run two VMs and the cracker against my .cap file through to it's conclusiong; cracker ran for three or so days then told me it couldn't find a valid key. (good news, my wireless traffic is relatively safe for now. ;) )

My last test will be too try a pair of 2 gig chips in two of the four slots; I at least get my minimum 4 gigs of ram that way. If it runs table taht way then I can live with the memory limit until upgrade budget comes around again eventually. If I can't get 4 gig running stable that way; I'm back in the market for a motherboard that can properly make use of it's ram slots.

My nf7-s motherboard had no issues with all four slots in use. It just seems completely incompetent to provide four slots that don't support four chips in use at once within the advertised specs of the motherboard.

I ended up not making use of SATA RAID. I had two disks which I stripped then realized it was no more beneficial then just mounting partitions between the two drives; both ways, to drives spin without slowing each other's bus traffic down.

F'ing motherboards. It's bad enough that one can't find a good motherboard with more than two pci slots and no onboard graphics/sound.. now motherboards can't make use of there full potential? F'ing motherboards.

by dumphrey

I like to be able to remove and replace as needed. A bios upgrade wont make a 10/100 into 10/100/1000, or five a bad controller...

by oh smeg

But with these 775 Socket M'Boards you have very little room to grow at best you'll get a couple of PCI Sockets up to 3 of the New Sockets that I can not buy anything for yet and a PCI Express Socket.

The Ideal M'Board that I have ever used was a Old Gigabyte Dual Slot 1 Board with On Board SCSI which is the only device that I can see a reason to have On Board. So when the SCSI Controller Dies you replace the M'Board. Those has a AGP Socket 5 PCI Sockets and 3 ISA Sockets with 1 ISA and PCI sharing a Back Panel Opening so you could only use 2 of the ISA and all of the PCI or all of the ISA and 4 of the PCI but I never had a issue of running out of available Sockets so they worked quite well. OH and the SCSI On Board was considerably faster than a Plug in card which didn't support the same number of SCSI Devices anyway.

I don't like On Board Sound or Graphics and if a Board has On Board Graphics I see no reason to consider it for Purchase even it is it a High End Server Board there is no valid reason to have On Board Graphics and On Board Sound is only slightly more tolerable in my opinion.

But with the advent of the 955 Intel Chip Set the M'Board have just lacked any real room to expand. That AW8 Max has 7.1 Sound and it's next to useless. Maybe it's time to consider a New M'Board from Gigabyte this time but I don't see how one of those would be much better other than actually supporting a working RAID which I don't really want. :D

Col

by rob miners

but it looks like the MoBo manufactures in their haste to accommodate this new operating system have neglected a few of the basic features. Either that or the people that write the Manuals are not in touch with the right people. :(

by neon samurai

Each motherboard in the past has simply detected the ram and listed it in POST. When I first put in my 1066 sticks (started with two from the first buy trip to the store, second 2 arrived later). When I rebooted, the post listed 2 gig of 800 mhz which through me off and sent me back to the manual. Turns out, you have to enabled SLI ready RAM overclocking if you want your 1066 sticks to be detected as 1066. You can set the overclock to 1% which runs them at 1067 but the oddity is that you have to overclock your 1066 ram to get it running at 1066.

Each OS isntall and hardware rebuild teaches me something new but this one has had a few really "new" things.

by dumphrey

and I wish I could add something helpfull, but I am in the process of pricing out a new box, and it would never have occured to me to check the ram/speed actual support. Guess I will refine my research some more.

by neon samurai

But, in my case, I didn't ever think to check ram/speed qualified vendor lists until after the purchase.

New Rules:
1. no RAM sees a booted OS until after it has run against memtester86+ for over 24 hours with no red lines.

2. get hands on the motherboard manual or PDF version and check functional ram configurations not just CPU specs.

I usually seem to learn the hard way.. but I learn. ;)

by neon samurai

motherboard should only be the spin.

I miss seporate NIC, seporate GPU, seporate Audio.

I do like the cable attached external POST LCD though. That little feature has been indespensible during the last many months of hardware instability.

by neon samurai

Luckily the Asus Republic of Games boards all leave GPU to a seporate descrete board. The included audio board is actually a daughter board fitting the half-PCI socket so I believe I can use a Creative board there instead if I sho choose but the sound is just fine as is.. well.. unless that is the reason I get no sound from Assassin's Creed (but sound from every other program I've tested). That audio issue is for after I get stability I can trust out of the rest tough.

onboard NIC I can live with for now. It actually has two gig NICs so if one dies, I'll flip over to the other or I'll use both and play with dual NIC header transfers a little. I've also considered running VMware Server out one NIC leaving the other for my host OS only.

Onboard sound, onboard gpu.. bah.. I miss the old boards which you speak of with a nice long row of PCI and ISA slots. I can even live without the ISA. With one GPU in the PCI-E slot, I only get one usable PCI slot which is now home to my Hauppauge board.

by neon samurai

I've been fighting with this for six months.

- 2 sticks of 1 gig ram at 800 mhz
- 2 sticks of 1 gig ram at 1066 mhz
- 4 sticks of 1 gig ram at 800 mhz
- 4 sticks of 1 gig ram at 1066 mhz

- bios set to automatic 800 mhz settings
- bios set to manual 800 mhz and power levels
- bios set to automatic 1066 mhz settings
- bios set to manual 1066 mhz settings

- tried ram from the qualified vendor list
- tried ram from the professional gamer quality list

- read and reread the motherboard manual
- read and reread the online forums

I've learned one thing. The Asus Striker II Formula is a
piece of sht.

- can't use all four ram slots at one time
- known to be unstable when run with a Q6600 cpu (it's a
64bit F'ing motherboard)
- remained stable for a maximum of 8 days at it's best
- boot fails at detram or detvram more often than it
finishes post and loads to an OS
- when it does load to an OS, I inevitably return to find it
frozen completely or demonstrating cascading program
failures

Republic of Games hardware for professional gamers; My
Atz.

If anyone has an idea I've not tried, I'm willing to test it
between now and the soonest moment I can rip that
board out and replace it. Otherwise, I'm done with Asus
and the drunk engineers that thought this board was
ready for production.

by oh smeg

Gigabyte M'Board to have a play with.

As I'm not a gamer I'm not overly sure what to throw at it so I'll let the son have a play with it for a while and then try to get it back off him. I'll be fitting 4 X 1 Gig Corsair RAM Sticks and if that proves useless 2 X 2 GIG Corsair RAM I've got both here so I'll see what works or works best.

The boy likes Need For Speed Type games so I'll see how well it works on that type of thing.

But after I assemble the unit there will be no free Slots available to plug anything into and I'm only adding a TV Tuner and a Sound Card. Useless these new M'Boards are as there is no expansion Capability. Of course there is a 1 GIG ATI PCI X-Press Video Card going onto the M'Board but really 3 Plug In cards will fully populate it till the new PCIE cards become available which isn't any time soon. Even then there are only 2 Sockets available so there is very little that can be added and this is the top of the range. :(

Col

by neon samurai

That's not to say that I don't enjoy playing remotely recent games but I don't OC the system to get higher frame rates nor did I expect it to run Crysis with graphic settings maxed out. I use recent game titles as a multimedia benchmark; if it can push a modern video game then it should have no issues with lesser tasks. (games have always pushed hardware development.)

My heaviest load these days beyond Assasin's Creed is concorent VMs. VMs are the new primary benchmark with Games secondary. I don't get much time to actually play games while VMs are crucial to my work productivity (contract and personal education). Right now, I have two seporate side projects which rely on being able to design the OS build within a VM as Development and Testing stages with Testing builds remaining along side the production install on hardware. If I could afford a rack or multiple machines at home, my setup wuld be a little different but a properly raided NAS for the house is more pressing than a "Development Studio" server.

When home, I need my workstation to remain stable so I can work on multiple VMs depending on the project or function as an application server when I'm around the house using a notebook as a thinclient. When out of the house, I need that machine alive and available as a respository and application server as needed.

The first time I had an issue was when at a clients. I start my day by going into the machine at home, checking my email through the home hosted email client then downloading anything I've prepared for the tasks that visit. I was presented with "server not responding" when I tried to ssh in and found my machine locked when I returned home. Rebooting failed during the ram init.

This last time, I went down stairs Saturday morning to find my old friend "Sir Frozen McUsless" workstation locked up. Nothing new in six months of trying every RAM bios and hardware configuration I can find plus returning bad ram under warranty.

The heaviest load was when testing ram and CPU by opening multiple cracking sessions against my own wifi trafic CAP files. Prolonged heaviest load has been by opening multiple VMs including a few Windows VMs (they really suck ram up quick). This last crash was with my single groupware VM in the background and X on the screen.

It's somewhere between RAM and GPU and I'm not unwilling to consider the latter but my pacience is pretty much exhausted having never had this kind of grief in many years of building systems in professional and personal environments. I would also be less pissed if this was not effecting my ability work; I have deadlines for these VM builds and something barely better than paper clips ducktaped together to use.

I think I'll be looking at Gigabit and Abit motherboards unless all the forums report that one of the other Asus ROG boards is flawless; giving up the external post lcd is the biggest loss. My NF7-S was a dream to build on top of.

by oh smeg

As I've got a bit carried away. I have 2 Gigabyte M'Boards running with 4 Sticks of RAM Fitted both without a problem. There is a GA-EP43-DSL3 and don't ask why it's such a bottom line M'Board and a GA-X48T-DQ6

The Intel 43 Chip Set is running with 4 X ! GIG Sticks and the 48 Chip Set one is running with 4 X 2 GIG Sticks fitted. Sorry but only Windows on the 43 one at the moment and it will stay that way most likely as the 8 GIG of RAM is too much to consider using on a Windows Box here. XP seems quite happy with the 4 GIG Memory Load and Mandriva is extremely pleased with the 8 Gigs of RAM it has available to it for the moment. I'll switch over to a 64 Bit version of Debian after I have this tested.

Not a problem with anything with either of these M'Boards though.

Col

by neon samurai

I don't overclock but I usually start by looking at OC/Gamer boards first for the better components and abuility to make adjustments when really needed.

Four sticks at once is high on my list too as I'll eventually upgrade 4*1gigs to 4*2gigs or 4*4gigs before running the rig too it's eventual retirnment.

Off hand, which image disk are you using for the 64bit Deb? I'm looking at Stable and Testing but they both seem to have only 32bit in the x86 lines unless I'm understanding them incorrectly.

by oh smeg

Granted the Debian Beta's are better than a M$ RTM but even they can be unstable compared to the Stable Release of Debian.

I use the AMD 64 Disc's as these are supported by the Intel Instruction Set now and seem to work without problems.

I try to use Gigabyte Boards wherever possible because they just work failing Gigabyte I like Tyan and ABit M'Boards but I find that the Gigabyte Boards are just better for Desktops while Tyan Boards are excellent Server Boards. I don't think that their Desktop Boards are as good as the Gigabyte but that's just a personal thing here. Generally between Gigabyte & Tyan I can find a suitable M'Board or if it's like that 43 Chip Set thing which gets frosted on me by a mistake at the suppliers and no stock to replace it with the ordered M'Board I may look at one of the better ABit Boards. If they don't have any of those available at the time I just wait till stocks are available. :D

I only ever use Intel Chip Set M'Boards as they perform faster than the Non Intel Chip Sets so far I haven't had any problems by sticking to these build types. But the moment I step outside my Self Made Rules I do run into Problems.

I built a Server with AMD CPU's for a customer and even though it was on a Tyan M'Board it was a nightmare to deal with if it worked for more than a few minutes it was considered as reliable well that's how it felt at least. In reality if would stay up for about 15 to 20 hours before falling over again. When restarted it may run for the best part of a day or it may have fallen over straight away again.

I hate CS Students as this owners son was one and he insisted that AMD where more [b]Cost Effective[/b] than Intel CPU's so he talked his father into insisting on AMD CPU's. Didn't matter that they where unsuitable for the application or that we replaced the CPU's, M'Board, RAM and so on till out of desperation the owner accepted the need for a Intel unit which has been running for 4 years now without any problems. Personally I think hos son only specified those components to get them for himself when they didn't work as required but it cost the company over a Million in lost production. Didn't do me much good either. ;)

Col

by neon samurai

2x2 gig mushkin 800 mhz has been stable enough I've put the tower back in it's place. Seems it's just Crucial ram in general that the board didn't like; even if the ram did test cleanly.

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