Bad CPU, bad memory, or something else?

Quartz-1

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
May 20, 2011
Messages
4,257
I've had a couple of random freezes of my Quiet PC (see specs in sig). I've run Memtest and the first pass came back all clear - I'll try multiple passes overnight. But Prime95 fails interestingly. The Small FFT test will run and run, but the Blend test fails on the first iteration with a rounding error. On worker #4 first this time and then #3 a couple of iterations later; on an earlier run it was #2 first. Temperature did not appear to be an issue, being under 60. I've tried disabling hyperthreading without improvement. When I first built the machine, all three tests ran and ran.

So, how do I pinpoint the problem?
 
If you're getting errors in Blend, that's a strong indication that the memory is the culprit. Memtest is rather useless IMO. Bad sticks often times pass for hours on end.
 
It's indeed looking like a faulty memory module. I tested by pairs and one pair came up with errors and the other didn't, so I mixed the pairs and found that with one particular DIMM it errors.
 
Why am I having trouble seeing what kind of memory you have? Memory brands and models vary a lot more in quality than CPUs do. Is the memory factory overclocked? Verify by reading the part numbers off the chips themselves and comparing with SPD data.

What memtest? I've gotten different results with MemTest86 and MemTest86+. Sometimes neither will show errors but Gold Memory will.
 
Back
Top