Slow DDR3 RAM

[jonny12]

I have recently bought an i7 920 system and am running 3 modules of 2 gig 1066MHz in triple channel. But when I check in the Performance Test 7 system tab they all only register at 400 MHZ. Does anyone know why this would be?

I'm running them on a Gigabyte EX58-UD4P board.
Also I'm only running vista 32-bit, while I know I can't access all the ram, it shouldn't affect the speed should it?
I managed to find an i7 baseline running 2 x 2gig @ 1066Mhz in dual channel and my results were almost identical, which is actually kind of confusing to me.

Below are the results of my memory test:
Memory Mark: 857.6
Allocate Small Block: 3205.3 MB/s
Read Cached: 1999.2 MB/s
Read Uncached: 1907.2 MB/s
Memory Write: 2112.9 MB/s
Large Ram: 1117.1 Operations/Sec

Any help on the issue would be greatly appreciated.

[jonny12]

Okay so I've had a look at some stuff and this is what I found.

I actually have kingston 1333MHz DDR3 RAM but as its still tied in to CPU the base clock its only running at 1066MHz. I will unashamedly admit I know next to nothing about overclocking and as such have all the BIOS settings running in their default/auto modes. However when I looked at the timings I found that channel B and channel C have the same values, namely 7-7-7-20 for your basic timings (and a whole heap of others that I'm not even sure what they are). But channel A only displays the first setting, CAS Latency, as 7 and all other other timings are completely blank, just a simple '-' where numbers should be.

I haven't changed any settings in BIOS, as I mentioned above, and don't really understand why the automatic function can't work out what the timings should be. Has anyone experienced anything like this before? Could it be a defect with the RAM, or worse the motherboard? What I don't get is that the ram is still showing up as being there in the test, it just has 400MHz next to each slot 1, 3 and 5. Yet my BIOS is at least registering 1066MHz, but the timing info is missing for one channel.

I know I could manually enter the timing info into channel A in the BIOS, but I would really like to know what may be causing this to happen in the first place.

Anyone got any good ideas?

Maybe it just needs removing and a good blow like my old nintendo cartridges.

[Ian (PassMark)]

PerformanceTest collects the memory speed from SMBIOS, which is data configured by the BIOS. It would seem that the speed in the SMBIOS data is incorrect on your system. This should not effect the speed of your RAM. You could try updating your BIOS to see if that corrects the reported speed.

Regards,
Ian
Passmark Software