Can SETI@Home mess up my RAM?

[KingA21]

Can it? I have an overclocked computer (143*10.5) and my memory set to CL=2. I have had this computer since august and it hasn't given me a problem. I've been running SETI@Home since the 2nd or 3rd and on Monday morning when I checked the computer I found that my computer had been rebooted somehow. I tried to logon and it wouldn't let me. My computer has been getting blue screen crashes the last couple of days. I've noticed some of the errors saying "Dumping memory" or something like that. So yesterday I figured that one of my RAM sticks could be messing up, so I lowered the memory settings to CL=2.5 and some other settings on my 8k7a+. That helped a little but it didn't fix the problem. Today, I took out one of the sticks and my computer SEEMS to be running normal again (except without 512 megs of RAM only 256). So I'm wondering, does SETI@Home really stress the RAM so much that it could make an overclocked stick (143@CL=2) die? Thanks for any info. BTW, I'm using the SETI Driver no GUI.

 

[Engineer]

I would say that any computer that is on the brink of being unstable could be stressed to the point of "crashes" or "instability" when running SETI....


SETI stresses your PC, and if it is close to the margins of instability, then SETI could throw it over the edge.....It could just be a bad ram module (or almost bad)....

One note though..if your PC is crashing because it's unstable with SETI....it could crash with any intensive program (may not, but could)....even if you don't continue with the SETI...make sure you have backup's just in case you need them 🙂

Good Luck..

 

[teriba]

It's a great burn-in tester. SETI itself won't damage RAM, but it will expose your weaknesses.

 

[KingA21]

I took out the bad RAM module and I've been running SETI@Home for about an hour. It seems to be doing well.

 

[Migroo]

Same thing happened to me 🙁

People say that SETI wont damage your RAM, and yes I think that the RAM has to be semi-damaged in the first place, however the RAM stick in quesion is now completely useless even when NOT running SETI, so in my opinion SETI did push my RAM over the edge for good...

 

[Robor]

I'm not a hardware engineer but I don't think SETI can damage RAM. It's not as though pushing your RAM will cause it to overhead like a CPU would. If your RAM is being pushed to the edge of stability under normal use and you throw SETI on the system it will expose that your system isn't totally 100% stable. A good burn in is to load SETI on a system and loop a CPU & video intensive game at the same time. That'll push your CPU, RAM, and graphics. If you don't get lockups you can safely say your system is stable. If you get lockups you may need to back off the FSB a bit or turn down the RAM speed.