Dell Persicion T5400 post/ram

[comda]

Greetings.

I recently acquired a nice new system. As the title Reads, its a nice power horse. A Dell Percision T5400 that runs currently with the Xeon X5450 (2 of them) each running at 3ghz, and 4Gb of RAM. I had to add a drive and video card. For now im running a Nvidia 8500 GT and a small 80GT drive.

Issue is whenn i recieved the machine it would not post. The Ram Slots are in the configuration of 1,5,2,6,3,7,4,8 and when i recieved it it had a gig stick in 3,7,4,8 and after fiddling around a bit i put them in 1,2,3,4 and it posted. I moved the computer and put it back a few hours later to find it wont post again. i removed RAm from slot 4 and it posted but only read 2gb as im assuming it works in pairs on a channel. I tried again getting all 4 to work and in a way found the bad stick. I then rearranged the ram and currently running Memtest86 to try an eliminate the stick. BUt have no idea how to configure such a machine nor if im doing this correctly.

Currently once again i have ram in slots 1 through 4 and running the test with the supposed bad one in RAM slot 1. So far 73% pass in and no issues.

Any suggestions are accepted as to what to do next. I also have an issue where in the BIOS the fans go nuts but regular usage like in ubuntu off the live CD and memtest its fine. i will soon be installing windows 7 pro on it as its licensed for that. Thanks

[Calum]

I have a T5500 myself which is obviously a little different, but I'm somewhat familiar with this series of workstations.

Have you checked the manual for the system?  Usually with dual-socket systems, the RAM slots must be populated in a particular order, they can also be rather picky with RAM so are all your DIMMs matched?
Running Memtest on each stick in turn is a good idea if you can, off the top of my head I don't know if you can run that machine with a single stick or whether you need at least two whilst two CPUs are installed.
What BIOS revision is it on?  Might be worth updating it to the latest.
Also check your fan connectors, mine has an issue where one of the connectors is damaged so it doesn't read the speed although the fan does spin - this makes the fan slowly ramp up speed from boot so that after a few minutes it's at maximum speed although still reading as 0rpm.  Not exactly the same issue but it's worth checking to make sure the fans are all connected securely.

[comda]

Ive seemed to have narrowed it down to one stick. and its picky. Sometimes it boots from one, other times it does not. Last night i got it going with all 4 sticks and mem test passed 1 round. This morning it does not wish to power on with the same config i left it at.

So i think ive weeded out the bad stick. Not sure about the sensors. The fans seem to be ok when i boot mem test but in the bios they go nuts. once mem test has completed ill check the bios Revision. Not very comfortable updating bios but its worth a shot haha

[patio]

You may wanna throw in a new CMos battery as well...
If it's a used system that is...

[comda]

I have thrown in a CMOs battery already. Im running windows 7 on it as of now with only 2gb running and i got a nice used 1gb 4850 AMD GPU for it. now im trying to find a Audio driver as Dell doesnt even support windows 7 on this machine.

[patio]

Give the Vista driver a shot...no promises...