M17xR2 RAM upgrade..

Okay so I recently ordered this from Newegg for my R2, and it POSTs, shows 12 GB and passes memtest with flying colors, BUT I have noticed my POST takes a bit longer. As soon as I turn on my R2, it has a black screen for like 2 seconds then I get the Alien head, where as my 2 x 4 GB was pretty much instant the Alien head shows up. Officially R2 only "supports" 8 but of course I know there are other R2 owners with 12/16 GB RAM, does anyone else have this issue? RAm works great, just don't know if that was a cause of concern.

 

I have that same memory installed (2x8) and one only thing that come to my mind is that i had a problem upon first installation, where aprox 10Gb were "hardware reserved" and not usable by windows. Fresh OS installation fixed the issue and since there everything is working fine.

Did you perform a power drain?

Are you running 1x4 + 1x8 config? have you tried to run the machine with just the 8Gb one?

 

Pardon me if i'm wrong, but wouldn't more ram actually make the machine POST for a bit longer, because of the fact that it needs to "count up the RAM" during the boot-process?




- Scott.

 

i bought 16 gigs of g skill for mine waiting to install it but i hope everything goes well in mine

 

It's not an OS issue as it is during POST. And yes my 8 GB there is almost no delay.

 

I'm sorry, i probably formulated myself badly.

I meant during post, - While you're getting the alienware bootscreen and so on, before the choice of entering BIOS.

- Scott.

 

it is hard to fill 4gb of ram, not to mention 8gb.
If everything is ok in windows, then it should work fine.
Next step 32GB guyz

 

The 8Gb sticks have more memory per module than the 4Gb ones, therefore higher latency but this shouldn't slow boot time by very much :/

Also check if under Advanced > Performance Options your RAM voltage is as advertised (1,5V)

 

Tsunade, does your R2 bios have an option to enable quick mem test? It doesn't appear that the single 8gig stick you have is the issue (especially when it boots just fine with just the single stick installed)

i wonder if running in partial dual channel is slowing down the boot process. You're running 8 gigs in dual channel while the additional 4 gigs will be single channel. I wonder if putting in 2x8gigs will speed up the boot.

 

Hrm well once I get more money I will be buying a 2nd 8 GB stick. It's not the bootup time but that split second right before POST. It's like 2-3x longer. I just wondered if anyone had any other issues.

 

Tsunade, you perked my curiosity. So i did a small experiment lastnight. i pulled one of my 4 gig sticks. So i was running with 2x2gig sticks in slots 3-4 and 1x4gig in slot 1.

I did this because i wanted to see if the machine took longer to post when i had 4 gigs in dual channel and 2 gigs in single channel.

Result: slight delay...maybe a second more

I reinstalled the 4gig stick in slot 2 and it posted normally

This is not an apples to apples comparison to your situation because i'm using an extra slot, but hope it helps (in some way )

 

Okay well I bumped up the RAM to 16 GB finally (we had a sale on 8 GB Corsair Value Select, 60 bucks), still takes longer than the 8 GB to POST. Given Dell's do a memory check upon POST, that is the only thing I can surmise is the issue (literally more RAM will cause a longer POST).

 

I think you should try run VM and create some VMs to use all the ram, and see is that OK?