MemTest on Ram

MrG

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Feb 12, 2005
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On this spare machine I have I got 2x 1GB DDR2 667 sticks.

When doing something with the machine.. loading into windows, installing windows etc it blue screens. I went ahead and did a memory test. It fails the test.

When I run each stick by itself it passes the test perfectly. Ran the one last night from midnight till 9AM this morning. 24 completions of the test.

The second one ive been testing now for the past 3 hours and still happy.

If I run them together they fail within 20 minutes.

Any suggestions of what is happening here.
 
Either the RAM is not a matched kit and you might have to manually set the values in the BIOS in order to make them work together or one of the RAM slots on your board is flaky
 
The two sticks worked perfectly on a previous motherboard.

Ran it on a Gigabyte 8I915P Duo board. That board unfortunately has since passed on (RIP) - its hanging on my wall as a modern piece of art :P

Got a new motherboard for like R400. asus p5kpl-am se.

I checked before that it supports the processor: Compatible Processors: Pentium, Celeron, Celeron D, Pentium D, Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Extreme, Core 2 Quad, Celeron 400 sequence, Pentium 4 (this one - P4)
Maybe it doesnt gel too well with DDR667? - I cant seem to find the memory specs online atm.

Edit: dual-channel DDR2 1066(O.C.)/800/667 memory
http://forums.techarena.in/reviews/1073004.htm

seems to think it is.. but the board in the picture is slightly different to what I got here.
 
Will give it a try. :) Will try install Windows with 1 stick later today and report back.
 
When I run each stick by itself it passes the test perfectly.
Sure but in which slots? If you test them both in slot 1 then it might be that slot 2 is bad as opposed to it being a dual channel issue.

There are like a gazzillion p5k___ board versions out there so its no surprise that the pic differs.

I've got a p5k vanilla running 800's in dual channel interleaved & the controller is the same I believe so 667's should be fine.

Watch out for IDE issues on that board. :( Threw out half my hdds & switched to SATAs because of it.
 
Intel chipsets are notoriously finicky with RAM... I had the exact same problem with a G965 board. 2 sticks of RAM, system only stable with 1, but both pass memory test individually.

If fiddling around with timings (and possibly voltages) doesn't help then your only option may be to replace the memory. The memory that was causing problems was Elpida chips, when I swapped it out for identical memory with Samsung chips the problem went away.
 
Intel chipsets are notoriously finicky with RAM... I had the exact same problem with a G965 board. 2 sticks of RAM, system only stable with 1, but both pass memory test individually.

If fiddling around with timings (and possibly voltages) doesn't help then your only option may be to replace the memory. The memory that was causing problems was Elpida chips, when I swapped it out for identical memory with Samsung chips the problem went away.

Hope I dont need to swap ram out because the board is being fickle.

Sure but in which slots? If you test them both in slot 1 then it might be that slot 2 is bad as opposed to it being a dual channel issue.

There are like a gazzillion p5k___ board versions out there so its no surprise that the pic differs.

I've got a p5k vanilla running 800's in dual channel interleaved & the controller is the same I believe so 667's should be fine.

Watch out for IDE issues on that board. :( Threw out half my hdds & switched to SATAs because of it.

The board has two slots - Slot 0 and Slot 1.

I tested both sticks individually in Slot 0 and then Slot 1. They both passed 10 passes on memTest (Approx 4 hours): As soon as they both run together it produces errors within 20 minutes.

What IDE issues did you experience?
 
Memtest does not always pick up errors. Try microscope diagnostics suite.
 
Ran memtest on ram and had supplier replace memory DDR2 800 Transcend. New mobo G31 MSI and when I use the 2nd slot same blue screen problem any ideas?
 
What IDE issues did you experience?
Endless system freezes when under IDE load. Also sound stuttering on IDE activity. Spent hours troubleshooting it...no use. Its something in the hardware/firmware, cause it happened on XP/Vista/Linux. Various seagate drives.
 
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