system instability playing games.

[erikistired]

hey guys, let me know what you think of this. this is happening on the machine listed in my sig.

chaintech vnf3-250
amd a64 3200+
ocz plat el 2x512 pc3200

i was recently having issues with games, partially because of my video card. i rma'd that and the bulk of my problems went away. however i'm still having a problem with games locking up after a half hour or so, most notably world of warcraft. so i figure i have a bad stick of memory after googling the error message (the instruction at () referenced memory at (). the memory could not be "read".). i pull one stick of memory out and i can play for hours with no errors. okay, the other one must be bad. so i swap them, and i play for a few hours with that stick in. so i guess maybe it's one of the dimm slots, i can run a single stick in any of the three dimm slots with no issues. i ran memtest for over an hour (six passes) with both sticks in with no problems. i'm running prime95 right now. i'm leaning towards the board, because i don't think it could be either stick of ram simply because the problem goes away when i only run one stick.

any thoughts or ideas?

thanks.

~erik

 

[The J]

Hmmm...my motherboard (Shuttle AK38/N with Athlon XP 2600+ Barton) does the same thing. Try to find another computer to put your RAM into to see if you get the same problems in the other computer. Then, try to find some different RAM and see how it runs. My motherboard would crash with two sticks of RAM no matter what RAM it was. My RAM also worked fine in my roommates PC. I'd say motherboard.

 

[erikistired]

okay, i'm getting a failure in prime95 after a few hours with both sticks of ram in there.

 

[FiLeZz]

Any Bios updates?

Maybe the instability was fixed with a bios..
Worth looking into.

 

[erikistired]

got the latest bios update. if the memory controller is built into the cpu with the a64 does that make the cpu suspect as well even if it runs fine with 1 dimm?

 

[erikistired]

prime95 running past where it was stopping with stick 1 in the system. will let it go another hour then start it on stick 2. still leaning towards the motherboard i guess. might try tweaking the mem voltage a bit.

 

[InlineFive]

I agree with you on the motherboard being at fault. Bumping the memory voltage is a sound idea but if that doesn't work I would suggest an RMA.

 

[erikistired]

all of a sudden i'm getting prime95 errors with one of the sticks in but not with the other. curious. curious.

 

[mechBgon]

What memory voltage is it getting now? Looking at the specs, it's rated for 2.6 volts but I wouldn't be shy about pushing it to 2.7V if I thought that could be the weakness.

 

[erikistired]

it's running at 2.6v. one stick is now erroring out in memtest86 as well where the other isn't. apparently i've found the culprit. glad i didn't buy a new motherboard! not sure why the one stick wasn't misbehaving before, but it definately is now.