One of the worst things that can happen to you when installing your fresh new ram, bought with hard earned money, is for it not to work. While I didn’t pay any more than the FedEx fees from USA to Canada (which are pretty rape in their own right), I was nevertheless disappointed that the ram would not work in my NF7-M. Rotating the ram modules into different DIMM slots didn’t fix the problem, and nether did using only a single module. In the end, I used some older, single channel ram to boot the system and from there updated BIOS. Luckily, it solved the problem, and the Mushkin ram worked almost flawlessly afterwards.
When I say “almost” flawlessly…the NF7-M didn’t like SPD, and therefore ignored it completely. You’re left to manually set timings. When I tested the memory in an EPoX 8K5A2+ however, SPD did indeed work, and Mushkin certainly aren’t lying when they say their ram is set to run at 2-2-2. A note of interest is that the tRAS will run at 5 while using SPD, which isn’t a very good idea. Running a tRAS of 5 has virtually no speed improvement over 6, and may cause stability problems, even though I myself have not encountered any. If you plan on going over 200Mhz (400MHz DDR) I strongly urge that you set tRAS to 6.
Testing
Because the NF7-M used for testing seemed to be out of the loop, I needed to use the older 8K5A2+ to confirm that it did indeed have a working SPD. You can see here from the BIOS shots that the ram defaults to 2-2-2-5 timings, the last of which is potentially dangerous, especially when combined with 4-Way Bank Interleave, another default by SPD. It's perfectly safe if the ram can handle it, but can lead to a corrupted harddrive otherwise.
CPU-Z for Windows shows us that the motherboard acknowledges the ram to be PC3200. You see tRAS of 6 here because I changed it, the default is still 5.
So far, no issues besides those of the NF7-M's incompatability have arisen. nForce2 motherboards are very picky with ram, and although a BIOS update fixed it for me, that may not be the case for you. Check Mushkin's product page for their "mainboard qualification guide", which is a list of motherboards which Mushkin have tested the ram with, and a list of possible issues with the given motherboard.
