Re: Memory causing problems
- From: Paul <nospam@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 02 Feb 2008 17:18:10 -0500
Derk wrote:
Hi,
I have a computer with an ASUS M2A-VM-HDMI motherboard that has an onboard
ATI video chip (X1250) I couldn't install the ATI drivers under Linux.
Therefore I disabled the chip in the bios and built in a Nvidia video card.
I was also unable to activate the nvidia driver without the screen going
black. After spending about 40-50 hours reading everything I could
find about Nvidia and Ati divers + 3D acceleration, I finally had a bright
idea: I had plugged in 2 extra 1GB memory modules. As soon as I removed
these modules the nvidia drivers installed without a problem AND the
openSUSE Hibernate Mode worked again.
No my question: It's beyond me why the extra 2 mem modules cause the above
problems. Would 4 identical 1 GB modules (same manufacturer) have worked
without causing this problem? Are the modules defective (didn't get any
error).
Gr, Derk
There are a couple possibilities.
The BIOS does initial address map assignments. It allocates space for
PCI cards, PCI Express cards, and the remainder of the address space
is available for memory. Registers, such as "Top Of Memory" in the
Northbridge, are assigned, such that there aren't any overlaps.
Sometimes, the BIOS gets that process wrong. The wrong assignments are
typically noticed when 4GB of memory is present. (Because there might
not be overlap between bus decodes and memory, when a total of 2GB of
memory is present.) On some motherboards, a bogus "USB overcurrent"
error is reported, presumably because a USB resource is overlapping
with some other hardware space.
A second possibility, is the memory remap setting. Two memory maps are
possible, one suited for use with a 64 bit OS, and the other suited to
32 bit OSes. I don't see any remap option in your BIOS, but remapping
would have to be supported, because the manual mentions that 8GB max
of memory is supported. To support that amount of memory, a remap
option would be needed (or perhaps the drivers would need to use bounce
buffers). So while I probably couldn't draw pictures of what the
two memory maps would look like, there is a possibility of a problem
there.
I don't see a BIOS release notes description, that matches your symptoms.
(In other words, no admission of a problem matching your description.)
Another place to look, is vip.asus.com for the Asus hosted forums.
You might take a look here, for symptoms matching your description.
http://vip.asus.com/forum/topic.aspx?board_id=1&model=M2A-VM+HDMI&SLanguage=en-us
When you get a black screen, it is possible an error is logged somewhere,
like a system log or whatever. Reading the error description, might also
hint at the nature of the problem or resource conflict.
I gotta say, the manual and BIOS are a piece of work. Virtually every
feature I looked for in the manual, while reading vip.asus.com threads,
was not documented or present in the BIOS. And that means there are
fewer things a user can adjust to try to fix problems. This seems to
be a trend with ATI chips motherboards - it is almost like ATI writes
the BIOS, because it is consistently crappy. For example, how many
ATI chipset boards, have full memory timing options exposed ?
I remember some of the first ATI chipsets, where the BIOS offered
"fast" and "slow" as the only memory options :-)
Paul
.
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