Seeking mainboard recommendations (now: Gigabyte H55-USB3)

Tom Metro tmetro-blu-5a1Jt6qxUNc at public.gmane.org
Thu Nov 25 12:42:53 EST 2010


Richard Pieri wrote:
> Rich Braun wrote:
>> ...the Corsair...memory modules...come up as 1066MHz rather than...1333MHz.
> 
> This could be the BIOS being conservative.

I thought with modern memory modules and motherboards the guessing games
the BIOS used to have to perform was supposed to be eliminated by having
the RAM specs stored in a EEPROM on the memory module. Hasn't that been
the standard for a decade or more?

Looks like that is called Serial presence detect (SPD):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_presence_detect

In the first case, I'd guess it was a manufacturing error - mislabeled
module or incorrectly programmed ROM.

In the second case, would the BIOS really have special case code to
ignore what the RAM reports if it thinks it is outside some reasonable
range? Perhaps, but the values reported by SPD are already supposed to
be conservative settings designed to work everywhere. More likely buggy
BIOS code.

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/





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