At work we have a big badass render machine we call "The Boss". It has a i7 960 extreme in it, 24GB of kingston 1600mhz ram and an EVGA "classified edition " (8 ram slots).

We've had issues with it from day one, crashing, it would render then we'd come back to the fans blaring, the system crashed, etc...

In the end good ol fashioned know how and the experience of tweaking led us to the solution... The CPU in the BIOS had 1.1V to it, the ram had 1.2V going to it and the ram timings were 4-6 numbers tighter than the ones on the ram specs. Everything was set to "auto" (boss wasn't going to allow us to OC it and benchmark it... maybe some night when nobody is around!). It's got a $1500 FireGL card so it can rip through some renders for us, so I'd be interested to see it deal with a benchmark.

but yeah.. evga.. check your bios I guess? I've never had an evga board, I went from msi, to ASUS.. to ASUS...ASUS.. and recently Gigabyte... EVGA or DFI was going to be my next venture but that kind off puts me a bit. Why would auto not give the voltage needed? and bad ram timings? Usually auto is the opposite and you get tons of voltage and wide ram timings! Anyone had this issue before?

The answer is "classified"...heh. I hear those new ATi FireGL cards are the shizzle.

For the most part auto is ok if you are lucky. Sometimes, auto even gives you correct settings. But I still do not trust auto for everything. Higher end boards I have found to be much more manual in terms of needing intervention to set things up right. Once done tho, rock stable.

Get in the habit of checking specs and manually inputting the volts, timings and such. Then you should get proper operation and performance that you would expect.

Seems weird about the memory settings though because I thought the RAM modules included a little chip that basically told the motherboard what settings to use when set to Auto? Maybe one of the 8 sticks is a bit screwy or having all the banks full like that makes it act weird but still.

I would definitely not look forward to testing each and every one of those 4GB sticks.

Came in this morning and the damn thing crashed, fans all at 100%... I'm gonna have to test that ram. It's all like 1333mhz Kingston Value ram so that may be the culprit. Either way I'll whip out the Prime 95, rhino and memtest.. boy oh boy..

10pm!

Orthos failed on a memory test. It looks like that could be it.. The frequency is set down to 800mhz and even then it fails. They won't let me touch their $5200 machine but I can influence my lead to remove all the sticks but 1.. and put them in 1 by one to see which ones fail