I have built two machines based on Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L and GA-EP45-DS3L motherboards running various versions of OS X and XP. Both ran fine for a few weeks with 4 GB ram in them until odd crashes, file corruptions, etc began to occur. Removing 2 GB ram for a total of 2 GB cured the problem. A friend also had the exact same experience with these boards. Different ram was used in all these cases BTW that tested fine.

I found Tweaktown forums http://forums.tweaktown.com/f69/ has a special section for Gigabyte motherboards with lots of info on setting up BIOS setting for these mobos. Apparently they don't like over 2 GB ram with the stock BIOS settings. If anyone is having issues running more than 2 GB ram on these boards you may want to check out Tweaktown and make a few changes. So far I have not made changes to my BIOS to test this out but I will soon and try to report what I find. Anyone else have this experience and try the BIOS tweaks?

it´s the combination of a bad Jmicron driver for IDE and using 4GB ram. I have running 8GB without any problems. read this

http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=129222
http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=87267
http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=127611

I prefered to get rid of any IDE drives

Thanks Peach-OS,

I had heard of the bad jmicron driver etc before. My friend had his machine set up for all SATA and disable IDE in the bios and still eventually had troubles with over 2 GB ram. He runs a GA-P35-DS3L with a Q6600, NV8600, all SATA with Corsair dominator 1066 ram in 1 GB sticks. He started with 4 sticks and after a few weeks began to have crashes, freezes, etc. I had similar issues. All was fine for a few weeks until I tried to run Parallels or burn DVDs with Toast. They both froze regularly with 4 stick of 800 Mhz ram installed. After a few weeks the machine had disk errors that had to be removed by booting from my old 40 GB repair disc that has a few repair tools onboard.

What I find odd is that the machine will run fine for a few weeks this way as opposed to not running well from the get go. The same thing happened to my wifes machine running XP. Removing 2 GB ram seemed to stabilize it after a few weeks. Thus after reading the tweaktown forum postings I am wondering if the problems lie in the BIOS settings as well as perhaps crappy jmicron drivers, 32 bit OS issues, and perhaps some other things.

I guess it is time for some experiments with BIOS and jmicron drivers.

Solow

I had that same board for awhile Q6600 8gb of ram 8800gt all running for well over a month at a time without even shutting down never had a problem... but then again any of these P35, P45 and 965P Gigabyte boards I have had over this last year had each clocked in a month+ straight of up time with the same chip/card/ram just as long as I don't use the Jmicron IDE then I can a kernel panic anytime I want by putting the system under a load.

Edit: And I should add it is just the IDE controller only I have used the SATA controller in AHCI mode on the boards that have had it without problems.

This could be the problem as well. There is no DDR2-1066 RAM - if you get such RAM it does not comply with the DDR2 spec. It may work, but every vendor implements the 1066MHz differently. I am getting my P35-DS4 next week (with 2x2GB Corsair DDR2-800-CL4 Ram) and I'll see if I run into problems with 4GB.


- mcsmart

Not quite

I use 2x 2 GB DDR 2 1200 RAM (Apogee GT) in an Asus motherboard and a

Giga EP-45 DS 4 with Quad 9550 E 0

and yes it can be rather tricky to get these sticks to work stable

the 965 based Asus board simply was only really Prime- stable with a mild overclocking and a rather insane 1,5- 1,65 V NB vc.

The Gigabyte is much easier : the trick is always to raise the Northbridge voltage and to play around with the GTLs.

My EP-45 DS 4 is 8 hours * Prime 95 - IBT - and OCCT * stable @ DDR2 1150 @ 2,0 V

from 3 GHZ - 3,6 Ghz

Best
M

Get rid of IDE Drive
Full use AHCI and you won't have any problem

If you still need IDE or you still have problem try this fix

http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=127611

Thanks for your input. Oddly I used 800 Mhz DDR2 in my machine Crucial Ballistix 4 X 1 Gb and still had the same problems as my friend did with his 1066 Dominator ram. So maybe is isn't related to non-spec overclockers ram etc. My wifes P45 machine also used 4X1GB 800 Mhz DDR2 with issues running XP after a week or two. It is very strange.



Thanks sch8mid for your comments,

The Tweaktown site I referenced agrees with what you have posted. They usually recommend raising the Northbridge voltage to accommodate more than 2 GB ram - either 2x2Gb or 1x4GB arrangements. It is also recommended to add cooling to the northbridge. This is the settings for stock clock speeds. I imagine overclocking adds even more complications to these settings. As far as removing the IDE - I am sure that this has helped some people get stable systems with more than 2 GB of ram as well. I am not so sure it works in every case however based on the number of people having trouble running Windows Xp or Vista on these boards with more than 2 GB of ram! Unless the jmicron IDE driver for windows is just as bad as the driver for OS X that is.

Well, as other people mentioned: it could be the compination of 4GB (possibly all freqs?) and the cheapo JMicron chipset.
With the P45/P35 in AHCI and the JMicron completely disabled you should be fine.

- mcsmart

I finally got my P35 board and I do not have any issues with 4GB of RAM. I have only SATA drives and I have disabled the on-board JMicron chipset.
I'd recommend getting rid of all IDE drives so you can disable the JMicron chip as well...

Update:

Well I have been running with 4X1GB stick of Corsair Dominator 1066 for a week or so now with no issues at all. I used both schools of thought to achieve this by optimizing my setting in the bios for ram timings and northbridge voltage (added +0.3V) through the extra settings available in the bios (click cntrl + F1 while on main bios page). Lots of good advice and info available at the Tweaktown forum on all this and the folks are friendly and helpful. I also swapped in a SATA DVD drive turning off the jmicron IDE in the bios. The combination of all this allowed me to run more ram with no corruption issues or telltale signs of ram problems like I had previously. They included Parallels instability - XP would crash within minutes - and problems using Toast whereby the discs I tried to burn would not finalize or the app would crash. I have no problems with any of this now and have run for over a week with no problems. If anyone is interested below are my manually configured bios settings for the F8 bios on a GA-P35-DS3L mobo, E6550 C2D, Dominator 1066 ram.

Robust Graphics Booster___________ [Auto or FAST]
CPU Clock Ratio ____________ [7]
CPU Host Clock Control_ [Enabled]
CPU Host Frequency (MHz)__________ [433]
PCI Express Frequency (Mhz)_______ [100]
C.I.A. 2__________________________ [Disabled]
System Memory Multiplier (SPD)____ [2.40] - ram under-clocked to 1039
Memory Frequency (MHz) ___________ 800 1039

Performance Enhance = [Standard]

CAS Latency Time________________ 5
Dram RAS# to CAS# Delay_________ 5
Dram RAS# Precharge Delay_______5
Precharge Delay (tRAS)__________ 15

ACT to ACT Delay (tRRD)_________3-4
Rank Write to READ Delay________3-6
Write to Precharge Delay_________ 4-8
Refresh to ACT Delay______________ 52-62
Read to Precharge Delay__________ 3-5
Static tRead Value_______________7-10
Static tRead Phase Adjust________ [Auto] << Always Auto

System Voltage Control____ [Manual]
DDR2 OverVoltage Control__ [+0.300V]
PCI-E OverVoltage Control_ [+0.1V]
FSB OverVoltage Control___ [+0.1V]
(G)MCH OverVoltage Control [+0.3V]
CPU Voltage Control_______ [1.25V] << Please manually find and set this yourself, Auto/Normal will give it way to much

Limit CPUID Max. to 3.....................: [Disabled]
No-Execute Memory Protect............: [Enabled]
CPU Enhanced Halt (C1E)................: [Disabled]
C2/C2E State Support....................: [Disabled]
x C4/C4E State Support..................: [Disabled]
CPU Thermal Monitor 2(TM2) ...........: [Enabled]
CPU EIST Function.........................: [Disabled]