Hey folks, Mole again. Finally got all the peice to my new PC but lo and behold, I build and it just doesn't boot. It doesn't even post. The little LED display on the back says "DET DRAM" and google searches have turned up a lot of slightly different answers but none of them work.

The problem seems to be that the defualt BIOS is set to run the RAM at 1.8v, when it needs to be running at 2.2v, which should be an easy fix, if you can get the damn thing to bios.

Ok. here's what I've tried so far.

Swapping both sticks of ram to different channels of the same colour.
Swapping each stick of ram one by one to see if it will POST.
Taking EVERYTHING except the PSU out and 1 stick of RAM to see if it will post.
Putting each component back in one by one and then seeing if it will post.
Removing everything, removing CMOS battery, hitting clear CMOS button, remove power and then reinsert to see if it will post - nadda nothing zip.

I'm gonna see if I can aquire a crappy peice of RAM tomorrow, but looking doubtful. Anyeone else with any ideas? All I need is to get to the damn bios screen!

The specs of the PC are

ASUS M2 Crosshair Mobo
AMD Phenom Quad Core CPU
Nvidia GeForce 8800GT
2x 2gig 240 pin RAM
Phillips DVD-R Drive

Any ideas?

Abandon thread, I sorted it in the end. Seems the ram was just gay.

I'm running on a lower spec set of kingston ram now and all is well, I will get better ram once I sort out my new found debts.

nice build mate

I'm curious, why'd you choose a phenom?

Cheaper?

no reason I guess, I just wanted something as nice as I could afford, and the phenom was out of my budget so I bought it

Also, I tried installing 64bit Vista a while back - it crashes during the install every single time. The best I could do was get it to the stage where windows was installed but still being set up, even then it crashed (blue screen) and said "Windows encountered an error and installation can not continue" when I booted it up again.

I googled, but nothing seemed to crop up. Any ideas?

/me hates Vista pathologically. The only suggestion: do XP or cross to Linux.

yea, I haven't even installed Vista on any machines yet. My htpc could possibly use it but I shy away from its many major problems. So no, I have no idea what it could be. Vista should work better with your hardware than XP, not the other way around. Go Microsoft!