How not to order RAM for your motherboard

I ordered the wrong RAM for the motherboard in my new gateway machine.

When did I discover this? When I powered it up for the first time, I heard a series of 5 short beeps, 1 one beep. Looking that up in the manual and found:

5 short beeps + 1 long          Memory error     No memory detected in the
beep                                             system

Oh.

So I rechecked that the sticks were in the right slots, and reseated them, just to be sure.

Same result.

That’s when IRC pointed that I my motherboard requires unbuffered RAM and I had bought registered RAM.

DOH!

Where did I go wrong? I didn’t read the specs for the motherboard. It says right there:

Memory Capacity	     4x 240-pin DDR3 DIMM sockets
                     Supports up to 32 GB DDR3 ECC Un-Buffered memory (UDIMM)
Memory Type	     1333/1600MHz*** ECC DDR3 SDRAM 72-bit, 240-pin gold-plated DIMMs

DIMM Sizes	     8GB, 4GB, 2GB, 1GB

Entirely my fault.

Lessons learned

Read the fricking specs before you order.

Use recommended / tested RAM (I’m not).

Use the Memory Advisor from Crucial which clearly displayed the type of RAM required.

Check again before you order.

Learn from your previous mistakes. I didn’t. Twice before.

New RAM ordered

This is the new RAM I’ve order: Kingston 32GB (4 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM Unbuffered DDR3 1333 Server Memory Model KVR1333D3N9K4/32G. It should be here next week. Yes, I’m getting 32GB of RAM instead of the original 8GB of RAM.

For the record, I’ve already rechecked the server RAM.