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Memtest86 - should I be concerned?

S

soapmonkey

Junior Member
I have what I consider to be a very stable system. It's been in existence for almost a year now and I never crash, BSoD, or anything (unless it's as a result of buggy software or other unavoidable scenarios). I use the system intensively for gaming and have never had any problems thus far. I'm using 1gig of Corsair DDR2 RAM (2x512). I ran Memtest86 purely out of curiosity and it always comes up with the same problem:

Test: 6
Failing address: 000148e18e8, 328.0mb
Good: 40000000
Bad: 40004000
Err bits: 00004000
Count: 2

I've ran it many times for hours at a time and it's always this error and no others.

Now, even though Memtest is reporting this problem, I never actually see any evidence of it. The amount of use this system has had over the past 10 months in all kinds of applications I'm very surprised that this apparent problem has not made itself evident.

In your esteemed opinions should I look into changing the module now or wait until a problem actually arises? I'm somewhat torn as I hate there being any errors or problems within my system but I also adhere to "if it's not broken...".
 
Usually you should have no errors at all, but since you don't see any problems, you might as well just leave it. If it starts affecting you, then switch it.


Welcome to the forums!
 
Originally posted by: rod
If it's corsair, it should have a good warranty. You can probably just get it replaced, no questions asked...

RoD
Click to expand...

You should only RMA items that are truly defective. The memory timings could be set incorrectly, and his mainboard could be undervolting. Both settings can be adjusted in the bios. In some cases swapping dimm slots can solve issues.
 
If your BIOS and equipment is set to standard settings
and you get memtest errors,
then I would call the memory defective and do the RMA thing.
That is resonable to me.

It could be some other defect, but you start with the most reasonable.



 
Originally posted by: bendixG15
If your BIOS and equipment is set to standard settings
and you get memtest errors,
then I would call the memory defective and do the RMA thing.
That is resonable to me.

It could be some other defect, but you start with the most reasonable.
Click to expand...

The reasonable thing to do is start troubleshooting. Corsair also agrees. 🙂

http://www.houseofhelp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=44522

Q: So, back to the original question. I think I have a bad part. What do I do?

A: First thing to do is to contact technical support to try and solve the problem. Often the problem ends up being a BIOS setting, or another component in the system. The best way to get technical support is from the Ram Guy on our Support Forum . There is a whole community there to help solve your problem, as well as FAQ's on issues and questions that commonly come up. Or if you do not want to create a user account on our forum you can use our New TSXPress and get setting information and even help with submitting a RMA request. This would be the fastest method for getting help.


 
Thanks very much all. I'll see if I can rule out any BIOS/setting issues and then RMA if the problem does not become resolved.
 
A motherboard/memory combination SHOULD be able to pass a couple of day's worth of Memtest86 with no errors. EVENTUALLY, you'll get an error because of random radiation events, but that should happen only once a month or so (depending on how much RAM you have).

If the failure is consistant, then I'd do something about it. It shouldn't be happening.

It's hard to predict the consequences of an error like yours. There's lots of bad memory floating around, and people live with it. When the PC crashes, they assume it's a bug in the program. (Which it could be......).

The fact remains, though: It's entirely possible to have error-free results from Memtest. If you are getting errors, something's not quite right.
 
I misplaced my Memtest floppy so I formatted and created a new one and ran Memtest again. This time, I got errors on test #3 but no errors on test #6 as before. It was the same address and amount that gave the errors, only in a different test (and with different "good" and "bad" bits). I assume this means it's the same module acting up, only it decided to mess up at a different time? Or does this point to something else?
 
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