Apparent Memory Problem

SilentRavens

Senior member
Aug 20, 2003
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Right general specs are...

Intel Dp35dp mainboard
Core 2 Duo E6600
4 SATA disk drives & 1 SATA DVD drive
Asus 8600GT silent graphics card

and most pertinently four 1GB patriot pc-6400 DDR-800 DIMMS


I have all four DIMM slots on the mainboard populated for a total of 4GB running in dual channel mode.

My problem began with random instability problems in Windows Vista 32-bit. Basically the system dies, everything goes blank, the fans turn off, everything, and then it restarts by itself. As far as I can can tell there was no reason behind the crashes. After restarting, Vista's event logs only record that a disruptive shutdown has occurred, and they record no OS or hardware errors. Also this may be related; after several attempts I have been unsuccessful at installing the 64-bit version of fedora 7.

Now at first I suspected the power supply or some piece of hardware overheating. As far as I can tell from Intel's monitoring software this is not the case. The voltages supplied to the mainboard remain stable under all conditions, not showing a characteristic drop under load in voltage of a failing power supply. Nor are any of the temperatures being reporting outside of normal operating ranges.

At this point I double checked that all my drivers were up to date, they are. I also ran nvidia's ntune graphics stress test for 60 minutes to see if anything cropped up in that short time frame, the system remained stable. Next I tried prime95. I first ran two instances on separate cores of prime95 that only stressed the processor for 1hr 30 minutes, that ran fine. Next I ran a processor/memory stress test on one core, and an in place cache test on the other core, within 3 minutes this caused a system crash like I had been having. Prior this crash there was no drop in voltages nor dangerous spike in temperatures. Next I tried Vista's memory diagnostics, so far I have been unable to get the computer to complete them, the system shutdowns by itself before they complete.

Now I tried the same process (running the prime95 memory test) only using 2 memory dimms installed rather than four, and the system remains stable. Now here is the wierd thing, the systems seems perfectly stable no matter what combination of two dimms I use, just as long as I have only 2 memory dimms installed and not 4. If one set of two dimms worked fine and the other didn't I would blame it on the memory and return it as defective, but all of my memory seems to work fine just as long as I don't use it all together.

Any ideas?
 

airhendrix13

Senior member
Oct 15, 2006
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First, go into your BIOS and make sure your memry sticks are getting enough power. The BIOS defaults it to auto and sometimes that doesn't provide the proper amount of power. If this doesn't solve it, then try running memtest to see if you have any bad sticks of RAM.

I hope this helps,

Ryan
 

SilentRavens

Senior member
Aug 20, 2003
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76
www.mhughes.info
Ah ha, I knew I had forgotten to mention something. memtest86 will not load, I can download the latest bootable cdrom .iso file, create a cd with it, but memtest86 will not boot the system. It will state loading on the screen and stop there. That maybe my fault, but I can't think of anything I can doing wrong.

Also this being an intel board there is no such thing as bumping voltages, the memory runs at 1.8v volts and thats it. I can change timings and frequency, but I am already running at 5-5-5-16 @ 800Mhz so I am not sure about that doing anything.

Thanks for any help, I know this is an esoteric problem