3 sticks of PC3200 on a K7N2 - boot failure cycle

I have an MSI K7N2 motherboard. I've been running two sticks of Geil PC3200 512 MBs with it and today picked up a third stick, one Geil PC3200 1 GB stick. (So now I have two 512s and one GB stick for a total of 2 gigs of RAM.) According to its specifications my board should be able to take all three, but so far I'm just getting a boot > quick blue screen > restart > boot etc. failure cycle when I have all three in at once. I've tried these combinations:

Slot 1 - 1 GB
Slot 2 - 512 MB
Slot 3 - 512 MB

Slot 1 - 512 MB
Slot 2 - 512 MB
Slot 3 - 1 GB

But both ways have given me the same crash. Do I just have the sticks in wrong, or is there some other order I should be using them in? I understand the K7N2 has Dual Channel capability, but I wouldn't think that should bar me from using all three slots. Restoring the configuration to just the two original DIMMs makes everything work fine again. I don't necessarily care about Dual Channel; I just want all three sticks to be able to be in at once.

Any help would be greatly appreciated...

Thanks,
m19

 

This is strange... I tried one more arrangement:

Slot 1 - 512 MB
Slot 2 - 1 GB
Slot 3 - 512 MB

...and the first time I booted up, I logged into windows and then got a blue screen with this error:

Page fault in nonpage area. STOP: 0x0000005 (numbers...)

...so I rebooted again, went into the BIOS (didn't change anything), restarted Windows, and for the time being it appears to be running fine as I'm typing this from Windows with the two gigs total. Should I be worried that it'll happen again, or what?

m19

 

Try booting with just the new stick of ram. It could be that its bad. You can test it by downloading memtest or a similar program here at majorgeeks.

Hope it help. and good luck.

 

I booted three times, each with just one of the sticks and it worked great every time, including with the new one. Memtests cleared okay on all three when they were by themselves as well. On a hunch, I tried a stick in just the third slot (the one that I hadn't been using before) and lo and behold, I got a RAM error beep at bootup. So it appeared that my third RAM slot is bad. Lovely.

I took the RAM back out and cleaned the slot out with some compressed air, in case it was just a bad connection between the slot and the stick's pins. After doing that, I was able to boot up normally and get into Windows-- for a time. It gave me the BSOD and rebooted about five minutes after being in Windows. At this point, I'm hesitant to try anything else lest it causes any damage to the machine or my files, but I'd really like to get that third stick working... Is there anything else I can try that might diagnose what's wrong with slot 3?

m19

 

Get some Color TV Tuner Cleaner (spray can) from Radio Shack and give slot 3 a good cleaning. Good chance it got dirty while unused.

 

Is that any different from compressed air? (Because I've tried that.) I'll run out later and see if I can find some, and'll report back...

m19

 

there is no diff in the two compressed air will remove any dust that was built up.

 

Morgan19;

the differance between air and turner spray is the chemical compund in true turner spray, it is made to chemically remove corrosion on gold contacts, air will move dust from the surface but don't turn it upside down or shake the can. one can leave the chemecial propelent film on the contacts.
I would suggest a careful look at the bad slot for conact alinment, if all is well insert and remove the memory card several times to help clean the contacts and then use the air and try to start up the pc.
The older mobo had a lead mem slot 0(position1 or 3), as the lead slot, and it would not read past the lead slot if the mem stick was the largest in the array, so u would put the mem in a accending order.

hope this helps
asturnacle