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Early last month I bought my first Core i-series system, build out of a Core i5-760 CPU, an MSI P55-GD65 motherboard, and two DDR3 4GB RAM modules. When I first built it I noticed two oddities: 1) In dual-channel RAM config (sockets 1/3 populated), it only recognized 4GB out of the 8GB of RAM 2) It would power-cycle about 3-4 times before coming up. At the time, I opted to run single-channel RAM (sockets 1/2) and not worry about the power-cycling weirdness. Last week I bought two more RAM modules and the system didn't recognize any additional RAM. Today I spent about 2 hours digging into this and came up completely empty: Googling for answers leads me to believe I should scrap the mainboard and start over with something else that doesn't contain a Foxconn CPU socket. An update to the newest BIOS release (1.10) does fix the bizarre power-cycling issue. But the RAM issue remains. (BIOS splash-screen and other menus report all the RAM I installed, but Linux uses only half the available amount, whether I install 2 modules or 4; there is a lot of chatter online about "reserved memory", a BIOS feature called "memory remapping" which is not selectable in the MSI BIOS, bent CPU socket pins, and on and on...) What would y'all do about this? Take the whole thing into Microcenter and say "debug this"? (Hah.) Or just toss the mainboard into the basement parts bin and start over, like I'm now inclined to do? -rich
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