Dead Ballistix, I want your info :)

To be honest, I think it's probably the 81.95 drivers from nvidia that I am using. I read that the earlier 81-series drivers had issues with their dual-core support (I'm on an X2), so I'm going to try rolling back to the 78-series and see what happens. The main thing it crashes in is Counter-Strike: Source on me. I just didn't want to rule out something hardware-wise after seeing this thread if there was something obvious that I had missed.
 
BL6464Z402.8TD

CL1115J.Z4
58092

I am having issues of BSOD something like IRQ not equal to " random reboots, etc. I am checking to see if it is my video card but now that I see all of these peopel having problems I am thinking that it is my ram :(
 
Well I took out thje Ballistix and everything is running great. I am pissed that now I only have 1gb instead of 2gb
 
Update on my ballistix Tracers. (CL1115Q.P7)

After having this system together about 3 months I was getting random lockups in CS:Source and even when sitting idle in WIndows. Was never an issue when I first put this machine together, like I posted a while ago, I was getting random blue screens and lockups about 3 weeks after the machine was put together. A boost in the DDR voltage from 2.6V to 2.7V seemed to get things stable again. This time I thought maybe it's a software/driver issue so I took out the Crucial 2 x 1GB and put in a set of Corsair 3500LL 2 x 1GB I just had sitting around. Things couldn't be more stable.

Whereas my computer would lock up while sitting idle after a few hours on Crucial, I can now leave things running several days with no issues with Corsair.

I'll put the Crucial in my P4 Linux box and run the hell out of Memtest and whatever other memory diagnostics I can find to see if the ram is going bad. Worst part is I've been so busy with work I didn't even get around to overclocking much. Highest I ran at was 225MHz HTbus at 3-3-3-8. Now I'm running 219 at 2-3-2-6. :D Still too busy to tweak the system. :(
 
well, mine starting to crap up.. got BSOD dumping memory now and lock up on desktop..

is crucial RMA has good service?
 
Yes they are very good and you will have no trouble with their RMA and they have seen tons of these coming back the last 2 months so you won't suprise them in any way :D
 
DeeFrag said:
Highest I ran at was 225MHz HTbus at 3-3-3-8. Now I'm running 219 at 2-3-2-6. :D Still too busy to tweak the system. :(
Click to expand...
if it does 2-3-2, it should do 2-2-2..

generally the micron chips have this kind of scaling
2-2-2 -> 2.5-2-2 -> 2.5-2-3 -> 2.5-3-3 -> 3-3-3

with no noticable gains above 3-3-3 usually.
 
(cf)Eclipse said:
if it does 2-3-2, it should do 2-2-2..

generally the micron chips have this kind of scaling
2-2-2 -> 2.5-2-2 -> 2.5-2-3 -> 2.5-3-3 -> 3-3-3

with no noticable gains above 3-3-3 usually.
Click to expand...

Oh, the 2-3-2 timings are with the Corsairs I'm running now. Do Corsairs use Micron ICs? All the reviews I've read on this ram could not get the system to work stable at tighter timings at 219MHz which is exactly what it's rated for. Again, I'll try messing with timings and HTbus speed when I have a ton of spare time. For now, everything is working great and stable so I'll leave it be. :)
 
oh oh, i thought you were still talking about the ballistix for some reason. those corsair should use infineon BE-5 ;)
 
My 2GB Kit just went bad, getting random reboots, its driving me insane. Put in my Mushkin BH5 and all is well. Well I sold the Mushkin so it looks like I will have several days of downtime.

56278
CL1115L.36
BL12864Z503.16TD

Edit: Ran these for a month or 2 at 2.8vdimm 3-4-4-8 with a fan directly on top.
 
FWIW I replaced my Ballistix at about 3 weeks with OCZ - 6 weeks into the OCZ now, zero problems. Running the OCZ at about 201mhz - was running the Ballistix at about 260mhz (10mhz above stock.)
 
ack, are there still ballistix sticks dying early with concerning frequency? (and i don't mean mhz)
 
it seems that the sticks dying now are like 2-3 months old.. i haven't seen any sticks purchased within 2-3 weeks dying like they were before
 
(cf)Eclipse said:
it seems that the sticks dying now are like 2-3 months old.. i haven't seen any sticks purchased within 2-3 weeks dying like they were before
Click to expand...

Yeah, your time frames are correct mr eclipse. I ordered 2 1gb ballistix at the beginning of september. 1 was faulty from the start and received the replacement at the beginning of October. The one stick that was good from the original order crapped out about 2 or 3 weeks ago and the replacment that I got at the beginning of October has just started crapping out on me as well. At least I can now RMA them both and hopefully get 2 good sticks. Wow this is annoying...
 
yeah, tell me about it. we still never heard anything from crucial. i'm almost tempted to call them lazy bastards for not doing anything about this.. and the issue is taking disturbingly long to resolve itself. :(


btw, your sig is annoyingly long ;) (and over the 10 line limit i think should be lower :D)
 
I'm pretty sure my Ballistix are dying or just retarded.
I've been getting unusual reboots every couple days or so. (Computer idles alot)
I never really tried memtest to check for problems when
I first got them but I tried it now and they get errors with any type of setting I give them.

I have been running these sticks @ 3.3.3.8 1T @ 265 mghz FSBH/HTT with 2.7 -2.8 volts. since the middle of October.(bought them on 10/10/05)

But again, never checked them with memtest before

But now when i try to run them at stock speeds (3.4.4.10 @250 ) FSB/HTT with 2.7 or 2.8 volts,
I get errors within a couple minutes of memtest.
I'm using the memtest built into my DFI bios if that matters.

Using 3.4.4.10 @250 FSB/HTT 2.8 volts I got 11 errors within 5 minutes.

I also have had a 80 mm Thermaltake fan on them for the last couple months.

I guess I will have to take the down-time and RMA these POS sticks. I shoulda went with G-Skill or Corsair.



Edit: My sticks are CL1115P.1Z and CL1115P.32
 
I haven't read most of this thread, but I thought I would chime in with my experience. I bought 2x 512 MB sticks of the PC4000 ballistix the week it came out, direct from crucial. I ran it at 220 FSB 2-2-2-5-1T at stick voltage for over a year, and then ended up just going back to PC3200 speeds when I moved to Linux.

Then one day out of the blue one stick went back. It corrupted my root partition (which I was luckily able to recover). It went from working the night before, to causing some weird crashes in KDE on the next boot, so I restarted X-server and bam, filesystem is hosed. I ran memtest on both sticks to find the offending one, and the one that was bad failed every single part of every test in memtest86, from both slots, even with the timings way relaxing.

So I RMA'd and got a new part and the two sticks are back to being happy. Granted my low latancy settings may stress the ram, at only 200 MHz it shouldn't be a problem. In any case, I was glad it was covered by warranty, as this was my first ever ram that went bad on me.
 
(cf)Eclipse said:
btw, your sig is annoyingly long ;) (and over the 10 line limit i think should be lower :D)
Click to expand...

Yeah, made it overly descriptive when I had a psu question a little while back and wanted to have the power draws in the sig...
 
Sorry for bumping this old thread but i need a good nag

I bought the ballistix kit 2gb around about end of nov and received it at the start of dec
everything went well but it was VERY VERY HOT, it'd burn you!. So i gave it active cooling
in about a month some strange things started to happen.

I ended up getting total freeze up in games and sound loops thinking it was my graphics
card i clocked it down, but alas it just got worse. I was typing away on msn and i got a bsod and ended up getting firefox errors for no reason.

I did a memtest after reading all the bad things about the ballistix kit and got about a 1000
errors in 1hr, so it wasnt good... i changed the settings to very relaxed timings 3 4 4 11
at 232mhz, it was only running at 240 before. I tried both 2.6 - 2.8 volts made no difference
i did an overnight test 23500 errors!.

I wrote a letter and sent the memory to overclockers, taking about two weeks they
came back to me with a email saying RMA... thats all it said, angry i called up
and they told me it was working perfectly fine at spd settings 250mhz and wasnt hot
at all.

Got the memory back, wacked it in did a test of SPD settings it was roasting hot
35313 errors in 8MINS!! they completely lied to me and didnt even test the damn ram
tell to tell me it wasnt hot at all and saying it works perfectly. :mad:

Spoke to crucial today, told me to send the ram to them and they'd exchange it faulty
or not to a new batch of memory and they had heard of the problems with the ballistix
and are researching it... theyd also phone me to let me know how it gets on.

So overclockers = wankers!
Crucial = Dodgy ram thus far, awsome service

RAM BATCH = CL1115V.GY
 
You should have contacted crucial right away not to send it to fellow OC, hehe :)
 
smellyfatchick said:
Yeah, your time frames are correct mr eclipse. I ordered 2 1gb ballistix at the beginning of september. 1 was faulty from the start and received the replacement at the beginning of October. The one stick that was good from the original order crapped out about 2 or 3 weeks ago and the replacment that I got at the beginning of October has just started crapping out on me as well. At least I can now RMA them both and hopefully get 2 good sticks. Wow this is annoying...
Click to expand...

Heh, just to elaborate on the "annoying" part (since eclipse seemed to egg me on my choice of calling it annoying... ;) ) I found that for some reason, these sticks will start giving me BSOD's for a couple weeks and be memtest stable. It's only after a few weeks that memtest starts to show errors. So I seem to be wasting time trying to find the cause of these BSOD's only to find that after a week or two, the sticks start to show themselves as the culprit. Now I seem to be in the same situation with this last stick and find that I'm gonna have to use it until I can prove that the sticks are indeed going bad by waiting for memtest errors. In the meantime, I can't really do anything important with my pc until this situation resolves itself (ie memtest errors start to show up) These errors have caused countless headaches (reinstalls, swapping hard drives, raid breaks, swapping power supplies, bios tweaks, etc...) and are quite frankly (as my original post...) ....annoying... There I clarified... Now I feel better. :D
 
lw3d said:
You should have contacted crucial right away not to send it to fellow OC, hehe :)
Click to expand...

True True...

Reason i did that was i was 100% sure id get an exchange to a different memory brand
i requested as such, to be told nothing was wrong with them its all my fault well :mad: :mad:
 
it's curious that crucial is still "researching" the issue.. but at least they appear to be doing something about it, and yes.. it's damn hard to beat their support. if it wasn't for that, i don't think anyone would even consider buying ballistix anymore. :(

crucial really needs to switch to a newer micron IC :p
 
So (cf)Eclipse,
What are the chances if I RMA these two burnt sticks that I'll actually get a pair that works for more then a couple months ?

And to be honest, what does there lifetime warranty mean if they just send out more crappy sticks.

;)
 
honestly, no idea. i know a bunch of guys over at XS that got the ballistix when the initial 1gb craze hit, and their sticks are still going strong. we'll get back to reliable stuff sooner or later. i'm pretty sure they've got the issues sorted out, but not certain. i really wish they would send me some for testing, but noooooo, the PR guy i'm in contact with over there basically refuses to let me touch em, and it's too expensive for me to just buy, money would be better spent on something to replace my gf4mx ;)
 
Aaaand another pair bites the dust. :(
I have had this pair of Ballistix for 2 months and the freezing, crashing and other glitches have proven to be too much to take. I tried them in my new BioStar Tforce board and got the same weird crashes upon boot and sometimes even freezing in BIOS. These sticks are as stable as Charles Manson. Two other pairs of memory are fine, and these symptoms were present in my MSI Neo2 Platinum board as well. *sigh* Off to RMA these boys...
 
We're writing to let you know that on January 06, 2006, our RMA lab
received your returned product under RMA #-
Your RMA is now being processed as you requested.

We appreciate your business and are processing your request as quickly
as possible. If you have further questions, please don't hesitate to
contact us. For faster service, be sure to reference your customer
ID-
 
myuu said:
hie. registered just to post in this thread :)

got my Z503's 3 days ago. CL1115Y.6K. 16TD's.

temps feel ok when idle. hotter than CPU on load. :eek: threw a 12cm fan over it just in case. running with my case open too.

performance wise... running 1:1 at 250 FSB doesn't seem to give any improvement over 5:6 KVR (2x512). :\

background: 3.0e prescott. MSI Neo2-V mobo.
Click to expand...

purchased 23 Dec 2005. errors 9 Jan 2006. RMA'ing. Never overclocked above spec, ran constant at PC-4000 with default timings and a normal 12cm ThermalTake fan on them.

*sigh*
 
UPDATE : spoke to crucial ram wasnt sent last night as they had none in stock
had to wait for a new batch, so there is a chance ive got a new batch of ram
anybody awaiting an RMA FROM UK will get the new ones.
 
myuu said:
purchased 23 Dec 2005. errors 9 Jan 2006. RMA'ing. Never overclocked above spec, ran constant at PC-4000 with default timings and a normal 12cm ThermalTake fan on them.

*sigh*
Click to expand...
i guess they're not allll better yet :( :(:(
 
Eclipse...

Any day now im getting the VERY latest ballistix, reason i know this is crucial in uk
couldnt send a replacement out last night because they had no stock, they recieved
a new stock and im due it tomorrow or thursday.

So if this fails, then the new batch is buggered too :confused:
 
well my 2nd set of 1gb sticks has just died .....i guess i've had them for about 3-4mths which is longer than my first set of 6 weeks.

same symptoms as last time .....random BSOD's out of nowhere at my normal voltage of 2.6. so i upped to 2.7/2.8 and they ran ok for a few days but died again. they had a 120mm fan on them at all times and never had more than 2.7v through them....until they started dying.

the killer is that these were real nice ones too as they went to 280 3-3-3-8 @ only 2.6v and hit 300 easy with only 2.7v.

looks like i have to ring crucial again for RMA and get the run around from some chick who doesn't know her TRAS from her TREF.

batch CL1115N.P6


***edit*** seriously thinking of dumping the replacements on fleabay and grabbing some ocz or corsair ....i think i'm done with these microns :mad:
 
I got my rma'd ballistix back from crucial, put it in and tested it out

TEST 5 97% 10mins or so 31321 errors

Bollox i thought not again, but this was brand new memory thinking it was a compatability problem
i put my corsair back and decided to test that

TEST 5 97% 10mins 29231 errors

WTF?!

This corsair had been in three different systems worked fine for years, and never gave me a bsod but for both sets of ram dual or single channel to fail at Exactly the same point whats going on?

p.s The ballistix is running ALOT cooler, its a brand new batch
1115Z.1Q
 
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