Ram behaving abnormally

Hey there friends! I sincerely hope you guys are all having an awesome day and I offer my gratitude for your help in advance.


I got 2x8 sticks of ram from a friend and have confirmed both to be working on his machine flawlessly. The RAM is 1600Mhz UNBUFFERED ECC ram from SK Hynix. Here is the model # of the ram: HMT41GU7BFR8A-PB


Currently I have 8GB of 1600Mhz DDR3 ram installed from G.skill.

I tried swapping the set of ram I have for the ones my friend provided and the system doesn’t boot. However, I discovered something extremely weird and abnormal. When I use a 1x4GB stick from my G.skill ram set and combine 1x8GB stick from the set my friend gave me, the system boots fine and the BIOS shows 12GB of ram. Upon booting into windows, CPU-Z and task manager show a usable 12GB ram which is wonderful.

When I try to utilize only the set that my friend provided the system doesn’t boot or post. There isn’t any logo, beep, or any video signal.


I will note that the ram set that my friend gave me is 12800E so please google the model # to get further information about that ram.

If you have any idea in mind of what is going on, please don’t hesitate to comment. I really appreciate it. Thank you all once again.

I have listed my hardware below:


GPU: AMD R9 280
CPU: AMD FX-6300
MOBO: MSI 760GMA-P34 (FX)
PSU: EVGA 700w gold

Have you confirmed your motherboard can use ECC RAM? (ECC is more typically used in servers.)

The HMT41GU7BFR8A-PB does indeed appear to be ECC, but according to crucial.com, the MSI 760GMA-P34 (FX) uses non-ECC RAM.

Although it's not typical, some motherboards might support either, with a BIOS switch to select which type of memory is installed. But even if you have such a motherboard, I can't imagine how it could use both ECC and non-ECC at the same time.

This is what puzzles me. The motherboard works perfectly when I have 1 non ECC and 1 ECC running on it. As soon as I insert only 1 ECC or 2 ECC it won’t boot.