Not Shy's Guide To BIOS Settings / Memory & CPU Testing

[Chaplinb]

Nice post, cheers!

I really hope i've posted this in the right section... I'm a new-comer (WTF is a Hackintosh..???)...

OKaaayy... So I set up my Lion 10.7.2 machine just the other day using unibeast with a USB Pen Drive... . It was really, really easy (Thanks guys!!). Only problem is (Besides the apparent inability to log in to the app store) is that my ram seems to be acting... strange. In some places Lion tells me i have 4GB, and some places it say I only have 2GB... Screen shots .

Ps, I Know for a fact I have 4GB of DDR2 SDRAM (Since i built this thing). So I suppose my question is, is Lion using 4GB or just 2GB..?

Thanks any help appreciated .

 

[notshy]

Don't worry - OSX will be using 4GB of ram.

 

[mousepadx]

Well, I am certainly glad I came across this thread.

After several failures of the OS to backup using Time Machine. Failures to Boot. Failures of the mdworker. Failures of the bootstrap. Failures all over the place, in essence. And after MANY reinstallations of the OS (because of the failures of TM a decent Backup wasn't available), I was just about ready to put a shotgun to the whole machine!

But then fate (and the search engine) stepped in and I saw this thread. Turns out, I had a bad DIMM and didn't know it. I am now on my um-teenth build and it's working just fine.

Sound works. TM works. Boots work. It's all good!

Thanks for the excellent writeup, NotSHY!

 

[notshy]

Well, I am certainly glad I came across this thread.

After several failures of the OS to backup using Time Machine. Failures to Boot. Failures of the mdworker. Failures of the bootstrap. Failures all over the place, in essence. And after MANY reinstallations of the OS (because of the failures of TM a decent Backup wasn't available), I was just about ready to put a shotgun to the whole machine!

But then fate (and the search engine) stepped in and I saw this thread. Turns out, I had a bad DIMM and didn't know it. I am now on my um-teenth build and it's working just fine.

Sound works. TM works. Boots work. It's all good!

Thanks for the excellent writeup, NotSHY!

 

[mranderson169]

very well written! good guidE!

 

[boid]

Golden thread indeed. Nice informative write up. Just made a few mods to my bios and got faster boot up time and everything seems to be working great.

 

[alanbama]

Great post. I was having some stability issues with things randomly freezing on me. When checking the BIOS settings, I found that The DRAM voltage was set at 1.5 for memory that requires 1.65. Everything seems to be working faster and it has not frozen up on me yet! Thanks!

 

[notshy]

Great post. I was having some stability issues with things randomly freezing on me. When checking the BIOS settings, I found that The DRAM voltage was set at 1.5 for memory that requires 1.65. Everything seems to be working faster and it has not frozen up on me yet! Thanks!

Glad this guide is still helping people!

 

[Solidww]

Posting a reply to subscribe and bump this thread. Sweet write up.

 

[notshy]

Not shy,
Thanks for this tut. I just got some time to test my computer. But whenever I test my CPU it goes above 70 C within 5 minutes. I was wondering what the SAFE range for a Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q8400 @ 2.66GHz.

Thanks,
Jonathan

PS. I really don't want to mess with the CPU fan but I will if necessary

PPS. The tests were Prime95 Blend, (took about 5 minutes to go above 70) and IntelBurnTest v2.53 (took 29.358 sec to go above 70)

I would say that around 70-75 is OK under extreme stress but that should be the temps that it tops out at rather than is still rising. See if you can use a program where you can view your temps on a graph and then look at the slope when you are doing your testing to see if if the rate of increase in temp is slowing down. Unless you are doing something like video rendering or audio engineering then it is unlikely that you would put your system under the same stresses that torture tests do but that is why you do it as you then know that your system will be 100% rock solid at lower CPU stresses.