As the title says, just built a new computer for Media Center purposes (specs at bottom), and I have a really weird issue. When I boot the computer a blue or red matrix like screen appears (picture below). Now all the connections on the board are right, the parts are compatible. I've never run into this issue before, never even heard of it.

Blue Screen
Red Screen

By moving 1 stick of RAM from bank 2, to bank 3, it went away till about half way through the Windows install when I get the red screen. Tried even taking them out of Dual Channel setup and putting them in banks 2 and 3, also tried the rest of the combinations, 1-4, 2-4....ect.

Now my best guess is probably DOA RAM or a mobo with defective memory banks... But knowing me its probably something stupid like and incorrect voltage.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Windsor 2.0GHz
ASUS M2A-VM Socket AM2 AMD 690G Micro ATX AMD Motherboard
Patriot eXtreme Performance 1GB (2 x 512MB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
Western Digital Caviar SE WD1600JS 160GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

A lot of ASUS boards can be picky with the brand of ram used. Mine only worked with a pair of Kingston sticks.

HTH
Baldrick

Sure sounds like memory to me as well. You only mention that you moved the 2nd stick to bank 3, so have you tried switching the first stick to bank 3 as well? And have you tried using only bank 3 and bank 4? I've heard the newer boards can give conflicting instructions as to how memory needs to be installed, and that the slots are now "color coded". I haven't looked at the specs for your board, but I imagine that's your situation too? (Note - I haven't built a new machine in about 5 years, so my knowledge of the current state of the art in MB design is sorely lacking)

are the memory chips the same size and brand? if not, might have to install them in 1 and three and pull the clear cmos jumper. using ultra ram on all of my computers with no problems unless they are of differing capacities in the ddr slots. but i had better luck with getting them to work using the 1 and 3 slot and clearing the cmos for some reason.

Both my sticks of memory are exactly the same since they came as "Matched pair" memory.

Is there some sort of linux app I can run from one of my LIVE CDs to test the memory?