WIerd problem, maybe ram?

[elchorizo]

Hey [H]

I'm having a wierd issue and I was wondering if you guys had any ideas. I occasionally get kicked out of WoW with fatal error. On thier forums there are a TON of people having the same problem so I decided its a problem with WoW.

However, I just ran into another problem. I was using quickpar to recover some corrupted rar files and every time I try to recover it ends in an error that quickpar says is probably a memory fault. I figured that was a problem with the par files and didn't worry about it until a friend brought his machine over. I had him try to recover the same set of rars and his did it with no errors!

I ran memtest on my machine for about 4 hours when I first built it with no errors reported. And except for the two issues above the computer has run flawlessly.

I'm using OCZ EL Platinum Revision 2 (1GB) ram.


Rest of system:
AMD 64 3400+
DFI Lanparty 250Gb
75GB Raptor
ATI 9600XT 256

Thanks for any ideas,
-Marshall

 

[merc68]

Well it's a good thing your pal brought his machine. Did you get his opinion? He might be able to help you out.

 

[Tenchi4U]

have you tried turning DEP off? Sometimes XP w/ SP2 and A64 has weird problems when DEP is enabled (which it is by default in XPSP2)

 

[elchorizo]

Well, I like to think I'm in the know, but I'd never heard of DEP until your post

Anyway, I set it to "AlwaysOff" and it didn't help. I'm going to let memtest run overnight tonight and see if it spots any errors with a longer test. It'll probably get 8-10 hours of testing.

 

[Tenchi4U]

usually after a 4 hour memtest session, it it didn't find anything...it won't.

DEP is "Data Execution Protection", since you already did the "Always Off", you did disable it. I know it was giving me a few problems with explorer and a few other progs

maybe a scandisk is in order? perhaps some bad sectors on your hdd. try hdd regenerator to check your hdd (or maybe one of those manufacturer hdd diagnostic progs).

also, are your mem timings correct? CPU not o/c'ed? make sure you make everything run at stock speeds when you diagnose a problem

good luck

 

[elchorizo]

Techi4U, thanks for the help so far

I let memtest run over night and guess what... it found an error The wierd think is that this time it found the error in the first hour or so and then ran all night and never found another

I've done a scandisk and didn't find anything but I haven't run HD regenerator. I'll give that a go. As for the timings. Although I have an overlocking board I haven't overclocked anything yet. However, that leads into an interesting question. On the web it says my ram is supposed to have CAS timings of 2-2-2-5 but when memtest is running it says the CAS timings are 2-3-2-5. I wonder if my ram is somehow underclocked by default or something. In my motherboard settings everything is set to the defaults. Most of the overclcoking stuff is set to auto... I'd be more specific but I've never overclocked so I'm not sure which specific settings to look at.

-Marshall

 

[D3v1an7]

I ran into that exact same problem (with winrar) when I was trying to OC my box. The ram would be fine for hours in memtest and then all of a sudden, errors galor.

Make sure that your MEM timings are set correctly in the BIOS (don't trust it to detect properly, contact the company for their recommended timings for your model number of ram) and if your OCing, set everything back to stock speeds.

Good luck

 

[elchorizo]

After reading a bit on the OCZ forums I decided to try increasing the voltage to my ram to 2.7 rather than the default of 2.6. This seems to have solved the problem. I am able to use quickpar without any problems and I played a 3 hour session of WoW without any crashes. I'm hoping that was the problem. Let me tell you, it was torture having to play WoW for 3 hours straight

Thanks for the help everyone!
-Marshall