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Interesting Memory problem

J

J9Darkwing

Member
I have 4 gig of crucial ballistix ddr2 800 ram. With all four sticks in I get random bsod's, erratic software problems and it fails memory tests such as memtest and vista mem test. If I take out the second two sticks I have no problems and pass memtest. I swap out the two pairs and still pass with no problems. The only time I have problems is when I have all four sticks in. This is most frustrating. Any suggestions?
 
I'd like to mention that I have nothing overclocked and all my voltages set to auto. You still think I should increase my northbridge voltage?
 
Overclocking or not, your putting more stress on the northbridge with additional sticks, sometimes a bump in voltage will be necessary for it to be stable.
 
Quicksilver is right on that one - especially if both kits work just fine independently as you stated - I got lucky on my board & it handles everything on auto voltage (northbridge) very well

also of note should be what timings & voltages your memory is set for. If you're using "auto" on everything there is also the chance that your ballistix don't like the voltage given to them. I don't know if its possible that due to the use of 4 sticks the power becomes less evenly distributed or less accurate in the actual amount of applied voltage vs the voltage set in the bios

Those sticks you have typically will work at CAS5 at 1.8v-1.9v *but* if you have them set for the mfg spec'd CAS4 then they might need a little boost in voltage - the 2.0v-2.2v range. I recommend a fan for cooling memory on anything above 2.0v but regardless of that due to the fact that you have 4 memory sticks I'd suggest it also as the air flow will be decreased between them.
 
I'm going to increase the northbridge volts by .02 and increase the memory voltage to 1.9 and give it a shot. I'll let y'all know how it turns out. Thanks.
 
Before when I had the 4 sticks in and ran the memtest it would stop seemingly before it started and tell me I had mem problems. After increasing the voltages I'm running two copies of memtest and so far no problems. 🙂 Woo hoo!
Thank you gents. I'll let you know if I have any more problems.
 
Looks like I got too excited. Memtest has found 8 errors so far on the second copy I have running. But like I said earlier it wouldn't even run before I upped the voltage. 8 more errors popped up just since I've been typing this post. May have to bump it a bit more.
 
are you running memtest in windows?

you should be doing the boot CD version but like you said try nudging voltages the smallest amount up & then test
 
I went ahead and increased my cpu to 3ghz, linked the ram so it runs at 900mhz and bumped up the mem and NB volts again. I am running the windows based version of memtest. It's been running for about twenty five minutes now and both copies are at 27% with no mem problems.
In truth I'd like a stable OC somewhere in the range of 3.2-3.4ghz.
As stated earlier I wasn't overclocking but I figured if it was a voltage problem and not a hardware problem I'd try to kill two stones with one bird.
 
A quote from the memtest FAQ page

Does MemTest support Hyperthreading or dual CPU machines?

Yes. Just run two copies of the program, and divide the amount of RAM tested between the two of them.

When I run it with only two sticks I click the 'test' button and it goes. When I run it with four sticks it says something about because of the amount I want to test that I should divide the value in half and run two copies.

Even though I have a quad core I'm going on the assumption that it will still test as much of the memory as possible.
 
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