i'm building a biostar ideq 200v for my parents and i'm having some issues. i put in a barton 2500 and a stick of 256MB kingston pc3200 and ran memtest86 v3.1 and i get LOTS of errors on test 5. if i lower the FSB from 166 to 133 i get ZERO errors. thinking it was a bad stick i went out and bought another stick of PC2700 (also kingston) and it performs exactly the same: errors at 166, none at 133.

i don't have another mobo with high enough FSB to test the ram in, but its seems obvious to me that it isn't the ram at fault. so i'm thinking its either the mobo or cpu. can anyone recommend a good troubleshooting procedure to take from here? any 200v owners have similar issues / fixes?

ok nevermind... i just reflashed the bios and all is now well. i think it actually had something to do w/ the onboard VGA. when the memory was failing, memtest was showing 240MB under test, now its working and its showing 224MB under test. 256 - 32 for onbard VGA gives 224. hell if i know. just wish i hadn't run out and bought more ram. oh well, maybe i can return it.

Well - I built a 200V with Barton XP2500 for my daughter recently and it had zero problems (and it was before the new BIOS hit the streets). Possibly a CMOS reset could have sorted you as well. The memory allocated to VGA is a BIOS parameter, BTW.

But anyway - typically (IMHO) a test 5 fail is actually a cache (i.e. CPU) issue.