Alright folks, here's a doozy (Kept me up till 1:30 this morning and not fixed)

[leethaxor]

[Leucifer]

Problems - Playing intensive games, the rig shuts down. Just outright shuts down. My synopsis is that now that I've taken the stick out of the slot, it's no longer giving me any problems so the ram slot must be shorting at some point during the processes and just shuts the PC down to make sure it doesn't overload the mobo.

This to me suggests that when the PC tries to tap into that extra memory, it hits a terminal error and just flat out fails. Going off of what you did, pulling the memory, and the response, that would seem to be the issue. Which sucks because it suggests that the slot itself might be bad or that part of what allows the CPU to utilize that slot could have an issue. It's not entirely bad because the BIOS and Windows DO SEE it. But, when it tries to actually utilize it..... bad crap happens.

In any case.... it points out to a bad mobo. Is it still under warranty? Which socket is it?

I had 8 gigs of ram before. Same company (Corsair). I got a deal for 16 gigs for Corsair ram, 1600, and 4 sticks. We're running it at 1.5 for safety measures; I've upped it to 1.65 but it still does nothing.

The sticks themselves might not be matched up or have issues also. There may be issues with one or two of the 4 sticks. This is one of the reasons why I generally try to grab sticks with larger capacity.... reducing the number of potential places that problems might occur. You might be able to utilize the two old sticks and the "known good" sticks out of the 16 gig set.

That's the thing; I have NO idea what is occupying the memory; there's nothing that I can do to see it.

Also, already checked the memory remapping tool, and it's already enabled on my mobo.

Did you try this?..........

http://www.winsiderss.com/tools/meminfo/meminfo.htm

Kind of a brute force tool to tell you where exactly memory is allocated..... though, going by what you said above... I'm leaning towards there being an issue with the hardware.

[Leucifer]

lmao.........

Reminds me of an old friend.....

"Red means 'STOP!' Green means 'GO!' Yellow means 'GO FASTER!!!!!'"

[Aggathon]

Don't RAM problems usually end in blue screens? Not shutdowns? To me this would lean my "weird shit-o-meter" towards mobo socket bad. Someone earlier was talking that it might be your memory controller, granted I am way behind on modern CPU design, but I thought intell's memory controllers were still on the northbridge not on the die itself. If not this could be an issue too.

The only thing you can do to eliminate RAM as the problem is to not put your ram in the "suspect" Ram slot, and rotate all of your ram sticks through every other slot and do your test that crashes it. If all combinations don't work, I'd say your RAM is okay. There's also a program you can boot from disk or floppy (http://www.memtest.org/) that checks every single memory address. You can try running this program while only having 1 stick of RAM in at a time in a known good slot to test the sticks themselves. Then put 1 stick in the "Bad" slot and try again. Some mobos you have to have a stick in like "slot 1" at least but then can have 1 in any other slot, if this is the case well just use 2 sticks.

You've got to eliminate all possibilities since there are multiple things that could be failures.

Idk... I think it's an outside shot, but I really think there may be an underlying power issue somewhere. Usually RAM issues cause blue screens, not power shorting issues.

Actually here's something... have you tried re-seating your motherboard? It will probably require you to re-set your heat sink which will mean re-applying the thermal paste, but if your Mobo isn't mounted properly something could be shorting the motherboard to the case, if it's the right solder point I guess it feasibly could be related to a ram slot you're accessing.

[Krenian]

One of the things I did when I actually was testing the memory (I already did the test by sliding each memory stick in another slot and not having the computer fail on me, which means I'm almost positive it's the slot), was to make sure everything was seated properly. The Heatsink is properly seated and working fine, and so is the mobo and every card. So that's something I can scratch out.

Honestly, I've gone away from only being able to get 12 gigs. So be it; I can't use that slot. My major concern right now is that 12 gigs being read and only 4 usable with 8 in the Hardware Reserve section.

I'm thinking of downgrading back to the first BIOS by flashing it, and then seeing if Windows will recognize all of it. It might be the latest version doesn't work as well as it should...If that doesn't work, I'll flash it back to the latest version and just grump. I mean, I can play games with 4 gigs of ram hands down; that's not the problem. I just dislike the idea that 2/3rds of my ram is not bloody available for use.

[Fetzie]

if your Mobo isn't mounted properly something could be shorting the motherboard to the case, if it's the right solder point I guess it feasibly could be related to a ram slot you're accessing.

Any motherboard short-circuiting will cause the computer to not post at all, and will either trigger an error beep code or a debug code on the motherboard if you have it.