Question Anything over 2gb ram not recognized, extremely confused

[Hotwiredflamingo]

Hello, this is my first time on toms hardware, and also my first post, so please bear with me!
The title says it all, here are my specs

Originally an hp slimline 400
Motherboard - Joshua H61
Gpu - nvidia gt 610
power supply - oem part, no rating
Hdd - 1tb wd blue 7200rpm
Cpu - i5 3470t, originally had a pentium g2020
Ram - came with an odd combo of a single rank 2gb 1333mhz and a 4gb dual rank 1333mz

I can get the desktop to boot just fine if I throw in any kind of single rank 2gb 1333mhz ram, but when I add another single rank 2gb 1333mhz ram stick, it either has a hard time booting, or eventually does boot, but the second stick is not recognized in linux mint or bios. Both ram slots work fine, I’ve checked by moving the single 2gb stick around.

I also recently bought some 4 gb single rank 1333mhz sticks with various voltages, and none work, no boot at all. It’s as if this motherboard doesn’t support anything above 2gb of ram, (which it should)

It should probably be important to say I found and fixed some bent pins on the motherboard, but it didn’t fix the ram issue.

 

[Darkbreeze]

You need to check some background information on the specific model of the DIMMs you are using because some of those DDR3 1333mhz DIMMs were low density and then at some point the memory and boards that supported it changed to high density DIMMs and the problem is that most people aren't aware of that, the memory won't say "high density" or "low density" on it's label and the DIMMs look the same.

So that is one consideration.

The other consideration is that the most common problem from bent pins on an Intel motherboard has always been either lack of graphics operations or problems with memory functions. If you had a number of bent pins (Or even just one) on the motherboard that you had to straighten there is always a pretty good possibility of that contact breaking or being compromised in some way UNDER the surface where you can't see it.

Or, if the CPU was in there (And obviously it must have been otherwise there are few scenarios where the pins COULD get bent in the first place short of carelessness) and was improperly installed, causing the pins to be bent, there is every chance that something else including the memory controller could have been damaged. Motherboards that suffer bent pins are simply "all bets are off" when it comes to "is everything still ok" because you just never know.