Is this a sign of bad RAM?

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dioxholster

Gawd
Joined
Aug 11, 2010
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In crysis and mass effect, sometimes SC2 but Im not sure because its online game. I get sudden freezes that last a second before it continues back to normal. Its like a stutter but only once during intense battles or when i click too many buttons who knows. Crysis is when it mostly happens, mass effect 1 too. So my guess is that this problem is something to do with RAM? its not the video card since I recently upgraded that one and this happened with the previous card. If its not RAM, is it cooling? dust?
 
It does not sound at all like bad ram. Bad ram and the game would crash or the system would blue screen.

Could be a bad hard drive or SSD or a Graphics Driver problem.
 
drescherjm said:
It does not sound at all like bad ram. Bad ram and the game would crash or the system would blue screen.

Could be a bad hard drive or SSD or a Graphics Driver problem.
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I changed the graphics driver, as for the hard drive its WD green 1TB and its from 2009, Maybe I should check it for bad sectors? reformat? But it seems like bad RAM to me though, I got 6GB and maybe one of them is leaking or whatever. Its not too noticeable of a problem, it could be the game's fault, Mass effect 1 and crysis arent the most stable games I know.
 
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dioxholster said:
so if its not RAM then what is it?
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I told you the two most likely candidates.

For the disk look at SMART.

Install CrystalDiskInfo and if it says that the drive is any status but good post a picture in a new thread in the "Data Storage Systems" forum.
 
not a bad ram, bads ram will ruin your windows :)

check for the HDD status and the GPU

keep a GPUz & the task manager and try to see the load/Temp on the GPU and the load on the CPU

Best of luck
 
Well it sounds like some form of throttling bro, check the videocard for sure. If it's the GTX 260 in your sig, they are notorious for that. Mine froze and throttled all the time when it got too dusty and started overheating. Also, try different drivers some of those nvidia drivers cook the 260's.
 
Well it sounds like some form of throttling bro, check the videocard for sure.
Click to expand...

Good point. This can certainly cause the issue. Also processor throttling. And a bad sound driver. Or a network latency problem if you are playing all of these online.
 
GPU throttling is much more visible than cpu throttling. Cpu throttling is almost instantaneous, gpu throttle can and will many times just pause or slow down or freeze.
 
the one im now using is GTX 570 and i also used the GTX 260, both got same issue, that pausing or throttling, happens during some big battles, especially in crysis. Isnt there much in other games and i only took notice when playing crysis and with new card indicated to me it was a 260 problem. My setup is not unique and i use recent drivers, windows is clean and installed for gaming not much else.

dusty? its a new card, but
PCIe --- could be dusty however how could that be when its only two years old and the slot was always filled by the card also the case doesnt have much of a dust problem i think. on intake fan and stuff.

overheating ---- yeah the new card heats up quicker and reaches 80c on auto but that doesnt explain why two different cards would behave in the same way.

sound drivers --- i dont think so, but how do i know? when too much sound files are playing it pauses?

maybe video card memory? but I bet its PCIe it used to cause me restart problems i think, actually im not sure but the mobo or card was unstable enough to cause restart sometimes overheating (even when on for a week continuously) but after removing card and reinstalling it firmly that problem disappeared long time ago...that or new bios upgrade whatever i will never know. I got another PCIe slot that i could try problem is, case is small and the card would have its fans close to the underside of the case, would that be good for air flow?
 
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FWIW, maybe it's just defective. I once bought a Geforce 7900 GTX brand new off newegg for $550 and it throttled constantly. It was defective.
 
Anyway, get bootable USB image of any Linux with memtest on it and test your RAM for whole day. It will show you if any errors found. This way I've get rid of bad RAM sticks in mine notebook while it wasn't crashing a lot...
 
I can check for ram errors but people here say pauses in games is not a sign of bad stick. No one ever experienced this kind of thing before? it doesnt throttle constantly, its just sometimes, Im now thinking its a hard drive problem...because that pausing also happens in windows sometimes and i see red led light on the case being busy.

one more thing, people mention memtest86, but what about windows memory diagnostic? does the same thing?
 
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