Bad Hardware

[Darkness Productions]

Last week, I made an order for 6 1GB sticks of Patriot RAM from Newegg. They arrived yesterday. At least 2 sticks are 'bad'. Both boxes that they've been put in report less than the amount I'd expect, one showing 3800000000 or so, the other showing 3600000000... I'm in the process of memtesting the hell out of them now, but it pains me...

Why can't these things be tested before leaving the factory? It just makes too much sense to me...

[CaptainMooseInc]

I've had more bad experiences with products from Newegg than good.

I'll leave it at that.

-Jeff

[Darkness Productions]

I've only ever had problems with memory from Newegg. Luckily, that's what the RMA process is for.

[PCZ]

DP

What you are seeing is normal behaviour, your RAM IS NOT BROKEN
The top end of the memory space is reserved.

How much of this space is reserved for roms etc varies a bit depending on BIOS / Hardware config but 200 - 400 Meg is the normal amount.

[Shish]

Yep, my Asus has a setting in the bios for if you want to install 4x1Gb sticks and get the full amount. It pushes some of the memory addresses above 4Gb that the MB reserves for itself.
Patriot ram has just come on sale in UK so not heard much about it.
Mind you, I haven`t got the problem of 4Gb in a box, I have enough trouble getting these Crucial 1Gb Ballistix sticks to run at 280Mhz :D

[Darkness Productions]

DP

What you are seeing is normal behaviour, your RAM IS NOT BROKEN
The top end of the memory space is reserved.

How much of this space is reserved for roms etc varies a bit depending on BIOS / Hardware config but 200 - 400 Meg is the normal amount.

Interesting. Considering this is my first box with this much memory, I've never seen that before. It's good to know this though.

However, one of the sticks is broken, as it won't make it through more than an hour of memtest ;)

[PCZ]

At least all that Memtesting wasn't in vain :)