Memtest Irregularities - What is the problem?

T

TFM

Gawd
Joined
Dec 9, 2003
Messages
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Hello, i am very confused and hopefully someone can shed some light on my situation...

I have four matching sticks of Geil PC3200 RAM. A while back, i thought that only two were good and two were bad b/c i was having some issues with them. So through a non-standardized test (windows would only go through the installation process with certain sticks), i weeded out the bad ones and kept the good ones - but i held onto the bad ones.

Well - for grins one time, while i had the old P4 machine open for another upgrade, i decided to swap the RAM sticks out and run MemTest - and they passed with no problems! So i popped them in with the other two sticks and they passed MemTest together.

Well, a couple of weeks later, the machine started doing weird things, so i re-ran memtest, and i began getting a huge volume of errors in test #8 - and lost confidence in my RAM again. It was rather consistent.

Today, i finally decided to spend some time working on the machine (it hasn't been running since the last time i ran memtest), and i took out every stick but one in order to try to determine which ones were the bad ones. The first passed MemTest perfectly. So i tried another stick in a different slot. It passed. I finally tried all four sticks, each in a different slot, and they all passed! So each stick was good, and each slot was good.

Starting to feel good about having tested them all just fine, i put them all back in the machine again and re-ran MemTest. Once again, on test #8, it came up with 48,128 errors.

Am i missing something? What do i need to do? Is it the RAM, motherboard?

Any help is appreciated!

Thanks,
Chris
 
It could be the memory controller on the motherboard. Do you have a spare DDR motherboard you could test the RAM on? I've had bad ram pass memtest86+ for a couple of passes, but once I did it for 8 hours it was pretty apparent. Keep us posted!
 
So should i test each stick individually for a few hours before assuming the stick is good?

About another board - i unfortunately only have the one DDR board - got rid of my others. But perhaps one of my friends is using a DDR board - i'll have to see.

Thanks,
Chris
 
TFM said:
So should i test each stick individually for a few hours before assuming the stick is good?

About another board - i unfortunately only have the one DDR board - got rid of my others. But perhaps one of my friends is using a DDR board - i'll have to see.

Thanks,
Chris
Click to expand...

I'd test each stick overnight (8-10 hours). That's probably not what you wanted to hear, but based upon your inconsistent results I would say that's the best thing to do.
 
it might just be a simple timing issue,

I had a P!!! mother board that would run CL2 in two of the three memory slots but not the middle.
I have also had a shuttle system that we had to shift the CAS to RAS to 5 (from 4) so the timing was 4-5-4 this was because the memory failed at 4-4-4 timing after a few minutes or so, but it was intermittent memory locations. basically restart Memtest and it was a different location, or a different module if I swapped sticks around.

This was originally found by having problems installing Linux or windows.

I would check the manufacturer’s information for the modules, and start with those settings on the board,
I know some DDR memory modules are set incorrectly in their SPD, that is why I suggested going to MFG’s site and double-checking the settings.
 
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