Schrodinger's Ram?

T

Tantalum

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Jan 8, 2008
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I'm having some problems with my ram, or at least I think I am. Lately some of my programs have been crashing randomly and windows will blue screen blaming the nvidia drivers for messing something up, this continued even after I cleaned out my drivers and re-installed them.

At the time I was unable to run memtest86 but I found a program called memtest which could be run from inside windows. I ran memtest, two copies of the program both testing 900mb of ram, and one of the copies told me that my ram was damaged. So I decided to try running memtest86 to see if my ram actually had a problem. First I switched out my supossibly broken stick of ram with a stick that I knew worked to rule out the a false positive caused by a faulty motherboard.

Test ran for 1 hour, no problems. I took that as an indicator that my motherboard was fine, so I removed the working stuck and re-installed my old stick of ram. Started up memtest86, it ran through one test with no errors, and a second test, and a third. Right now it has been running for 1 hour and 30 minutes with no problems.

Could memtest86 be wrong? I have been experiencing crashes (A good deal of them in oblivion, which always crashes with 'memory cannot be "read/written"' errors) so I know that I must have some faulty component somewhere in my computer, I just have no idea what it could be.

Is it possible that my problems were caused by improperly seated ram? Could dust in the socket have caused problems like this, that were cured when I switched the sticks around?
 
Do you ever get that error when you have not/are no playing the game or other games. ? In other words just use the machine for web surfing etc. ? I think it is a problem with a game mod or other software. If you stick passed memtest86+ for several passes the memory is most likely good.
 
If you stick passed memtest86+ for several passes the memory is most likely good.
Click to expand...

Most likely however I have seen memory exhibit the first failure after 72 hours of memtest86+ so finding errors does not always happen quickly.
 
I normally get errors when playing games, for example, BFBC2 will sometimes just randomly crash to desktop on me. The only game that complains about actual read/write errors is oblivion, which may be the result of a mod as the destination address for the read/write is always around 0x00000XXX.

I think I was using the latest version of memtest, not sure. It did behave strangely when I told it to use the remaining availability ram for its testing, the percent complete indicator shot up to the thousands after a few seconds, before telling me my ram had errors.

I ran 4 loops of memtest with 1 CPU and then ran 2 loops using both CPU's, they all passed without any problems. I guess I'll just keep using this ram, see if the crashes stop now that I have re-seated it.
 
Sounds like you founf memtest by HCI. It stresses the RAM a lot more than memtest86 does. I have stopped using memtest86 because it generally only gives errors when then RAM is completely trashed.

HCI memtest on the other hand, shows up faulty RAM a whole lot better.
 
First and foremost...any overclocking? I didnt see you mention if you were or not.

I get random BC2 crashing to desktop as well, though its pretty infrequent...i would bet thats the game though...not your PC.

If you are only getting errors when playing games, i would guess its likely due to the video card in some way or another. In my experience, anything ram related caused random lock ups, BSOD, restarts at completely random times, which is also, in my experience a very similar symptom of the CPU not getting enough volts. Again, just my experience. Nothing specific to playing games. Could just be sitting their idling...and pop..restart.
 
Well, I just got a SC2 beta key today (Yay), BUT if a game lasts longer than 10 minutes it CTD's, no errors, and it happens almost like clock work. At this point I'm getting a little pissed off, I have no idea if the problem is with my ram, or if it's something else. I had been using those Nvidia drivers that caused alot of people problems so maybe they damaged my card or something, I don't know. It's gotten to the point where I can't use this computer for what I bought it for (Playing games) and I don't have enough money to buy any new parts.

I have tried new drivers, old drivers, windows 7, windows XP, nothing fixes it. Constant crashes for seemingly no fucking reason. At this point I'm just going to spend a few months saving up for a new PC. I'm not going to bother trying to do anything on this one anymore since I'm pretty much guaranteed to lose my work due to a crash.

Nothing on the computer is overclocked, bios is standard, I keep my OS clean and under 400mb of idle ram usage.

I used to use this board for overclocking back when I did water cooling, but one day my CPU block burst open and leaked water all over my hard drive's, it ruined one and the other failed a few days later. Maybe the water also damaged my ram/motherboard/cpu since the graphics card is a new part.
 
Run Prime95 with the CPU/RAM mix, and run linpack/Intel Burn Test derivative for 20-30 runs as well.

After that, run Furmark.

Observe what happens.

My father always says when you just cant f-ing figure something out, dont discount the possibility that theres two things wrong.

Also, should have asked...give us a detailed list of the hardware your running.
 
I'm using a E6850 CPU, 2GB (One Stick) of Mushkin Redline 1066Mhz Ram, 3 generic 320GB hard drives, an EVGA GTS 250 1024mb and a 680i SLI motherboard. I'm also using a Creative audigy 4 sound card.

EDIT: Computer just failed prime95 with a rounding error. Guess that means my ram is bad after all, or would it be my CPU? Since a rounding error implies a problem in the calculation of the data.

Would overvolting/underclocking the ram possibly work as a temporary fix?
 
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When I had a bad memory module I too was failing Prime95 with round-off errors, so I'd say memory. Do you have another module you can test it with? You could try upping your memory voltage a bit, but if you aren't already overclocking I doubt that'll help.
 
I don't have any other ram I can use, (Posting this on my laptop) so I'm just going to submit an RMA request to Mushkin, I had thought that my warranty expired but it was only the Newegg warranty, Mushkin has a lifetime warranty on memory modules it seems.
 
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