I recently had to replace a 512 meg stick of PC3200 Mushkin memory that went bad on me. The new stick just arrived this morning and I wanted to make sure, before I install it, that it's not a motherboard voltage problem causing the trouble.
My system normally ran with a gig (2x512) of Mushkin level II PC3200 on an Abit IC7. The voltage of course was set to .1 volt higher than the default to enable it to work at 400MHz - pretty normal requirement for the 865 / 875 boards.
The reason I had my suspicion is this:
I often have Hardware Monitor running while I'm working or gaming just in case something is going wrong in the system.
Well, I began to notice alarms when I ran one program - and only one program. That was the Neverwinter Nights toolset. Hardware Homitor would beep, flash up quickly, then minimize itself. One of the meters was briefly, just for a split second, going below or beyond the recommended limits.
Problem is, Hardware Monitor doesn't record the readings, so I couldn't tell what was causing the alarm. But what I did notice is that the (and I'm going by memory here - I may be wrong) +3.3v meter seems to act very erratic when I had the toolset running.
And it was when I had the toolset sitting idle that my system crashed, and one of the sticks of RAM failed. So either there was something the toolset was doing that strained an area or feature of a bad stick of memory until it finally failed, or a good stick was somehow shorted.
Is there anything you all can imagine that would have caused a short in just one dim slot related to the +3.3v reading?
-J
My system normally ran with a gig (2x512) of Mushkin level II PC3200 on an Abit IC7. The voltage of course was set to .1 volt higher than the default to enable it to work at 400MHz - pretty normal requirement for the 865 / 875 boards.
The reason I had my suspicion is this:
I often have Hardware Monitor running while I'm working or gaming just in case something is going wrong in the system.
Well, I began to notice alarms when I ran one program - and only one program. That was the Neverwinter Nights toolset. Hardware Homitor would beep, flash up quickly, then minimize itself. One of the meters was briefly, just for a split second, going below or beyond the recommended limits.
Problem is, Hardware Monitor doesn't record the readings, so I couldn't tell what was causing the alarm. But what I did notice is that the (and I'm going by memory here - I may be wrong) +3.3v meter seems to act very erratic when I had the toolset running.
And it was when I had the toolset sitting idle that my system crashed, and one of the sticks of RAM failed. So either there was something the toolset was doing that strained an area or feature of a bad stick of memory until it finally failed, or a good stick was somehow shorted.
Is there anything you all can imagine that would have caused a short in just one dim slot related to the +3.3v reading?
-J
