No Boot after RAM Upgrade

DoopieWop · January 13, 2024

Hello, I have recently acquired two sticks of 32GB ddr4 RAM, which I wanted to use for my home server. Upon installation of both sticks, the PC wouldn't boot anymore. The fans start spinning and the EZ Debug VRAM LED turns on and stays on and nothing happens from there on. First I tried taking one stick out, which still resulted in no boot. Then I tried switching back my old memory, which led to the PC booting successfully. After that, I put one of the old sticks in and one of the new ones, which booted into the system again (with the correct amount of RAM reported in the BIOS). I switched the new sticks, to make sure that the other one was functional, and it booted again. When I tried both of the new sticks again still no boot. So then I tried, both of the new sticks and one of the old ones and it successfully loaded into the BIOS reporting the maximum supported RAM for the system (64GB).

I tried clearing the CMOS, which didn't change anything. While the system booted with the last configuration (aka 2 new, 1 old), clearly this is not normal behaviour, plus needing the old stick just to boot is not ideal.

OS: XCP-NG (Xen Server)

Z170A PC MATE (MS-7971)

Intel i7-6700K 4.00 GHz

Old RAM: G.Skill RipJaws V DDR4 3200 MHz CL16 DIMM 2x8 GB (16 GB)

New RAM: Crucial DDR4 3200 MHz CL22 UDIMM 2x32 GB (64 GB)

Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe M.2 SSD

BeQuiet L8-400w

BIOS Version: E7971IMS.AG0