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Thread: Badly Seated RAM?

  1. #1
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    Badly Seated RAM?

    Been having a problem with my new PC involving random BSOD's at windows boot and during random intervals where I'll either be doing something gaming/working related or even after I've gone to bed and left my PC on idling.

    Most of the BDOD's were usually a page fault error or IRQL_LESS_THAN so I guessed that one or both of my memory sticks was kaput. So I ran memtest86+ and within 10% of the overall test it had returned 7 errors. So I went through the motions of removing one stick and running memtest86+ on each stick at a time over all of the 4 DIMM slots.

    All of the tests came back negative for errors. :S Perplexed at this problem I reseated the RAM back into their original DIMM's, making sure to apply a bit of force to make sure they were well seated and then ran memtest and lo and behold it returned no errors. Could I just have seated the RAM incorrectly when I first built the rig? It would explain why when I tried OC'ing the system became amazingly unstable even when I raised the RAM frequency to its guaranteed 1066mhz state.

    Prime95 has been running for a while now with no errors or crashes so I'm holding thumbs that I can put this behind me and continue with my overclocking escapades.

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    Re: Badly Seated RAM?

    It's possible that 1 or more sticks were not quite seated correctly.

    Seems you've done the troubleshooting for yourself and got yourself an answer.

    Would certainly explain the OCing instability.

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    Re: Badly Seated RAM?

    I usually find my troubleshooting abilities only provide temporary solutions but here's hoping this one is a bit more permanent.

    Just needed extra opinions on whether badly seated RAM would cause a flaky system. Was sure there was only one way to put RAM in for it to work and that was tight and secure.

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    Re: Badly Seated RAM?

    There may have been a hair or some dust between the contacts, hense removing it and re-inserting it sorted your issues.

    Re-seating RAM is a common troubleshooting tip.
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    Re: Badly Seated RAM?

    I have a PC that has one bad DIMM slot. It will work, but only at 266. If you try and raise the speed to 400 it won't even boot. (The memory in it is rated for 400, just in case anyone thought I was just being silly) So yes, I think it is perfectly possible for it to be connecting nearly enough and re-seating it has fixed it.

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    The late but legendary peterb - Onward and Upward peterb's Avatar
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    Re: Badly Seated RAM?

    It would certainly be unusual - ram sockets are designed to close tolerances, but not an impossible scenario. The other possibility is that the two RAM sticks are now transposed (unless you checked) and slight differences between the sticks' capability mean that they work in one configuration, but not another. Again unlikely, but not impossible.

    Leave memtest running for a while (some people recommend 24 hours - if the problem doesn't show itself, put it down to one of those things, and carry on - but if you get unexplained errors again, home in on memory first.
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    Re: Badly Seated RAM?

    It seems I did only find a temporary solution...

    After spending the evening having the memory clocked up to it's guaranteed 1066mhz state I found no difficult in ploughing through WoW, CoD4 and Fallout 3. I then put on Prime95 before going to bed and like it has done every time to me this week the computer crashes somewhere during the morning whilst I'm in bed. On restart after the crash, when windows boots up it will keeping blue screening whilst loading up services until I turn off the computer and turn it back on. Prime95 showed 3 erros which caused workers to stop over the night:

    FATAL ERROR: Rounding was 0.4943847656, expected less than 0.4
    Hardware failure detected, consult stress.txt file.

    FATAL ERROR: Rounding was 0.5, expected less than 0.4
    Hardware failure detected, consult stress.txt file.

    So, I reverted the bios settings back to normal putting the RAM back at 800mhz and run prime95. Within 20 minutes 2 workers have stopped pending a:

    FATAL ERROR: Rounding was 0.5, expected less than 0.4
    Hardware failure detected, consult stress.txt file.

    I've just moved both RAM sticks to the 2 other DIMM slots and will leave it for a few hours or until it gets hardware faults. Is this more likely to be a problem with the RAM? I only ran the memtest on the sticks for 2 full passes, as my crashes seem to be completely random I'm guessing it's possibly a heat aggravated fault on the memory sticks causing them to go unstable. Or could it be the actual DIMM slots themselves?

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    Re: Badly Seated RAM?

    I have some OCZ ram that caused me similar problems.

    The ram was rated at as DDR2-6400 (800mhz), but requires 2.1V to run at that speed. My Motherboard was set to 1.8V by default. I was getting all sorts of blue screens until I upped the voltage.

    It might be worth checking the voltage requirements of your memory.

  9. #9
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    Re: Badly Seated RAM?

    I've applied my overclock to the CPU and RAM as well as manually upped the voltage for the RAM rather than leaving that to the PC.

    I have a feeling that when my PC goes into idle mode this asus "utility" called AI Nap kicks into place and zaps the voltage down to a more "idle" worth value. This could explain why my PC turns off whilst I'm away and it's idle rather than when I've been playing a grueling game of CoD 4 for 2 hours.

    Nearly an hour now in Prime and no errors detected.

    A query, my last computer that crapped out on me could barely get through 10 minutes of Prime95 before the PC restarted itself. It was later found that there was a fault in the L2 cache of the CPU. My question resides in the theory that Prime95 will find an error/shut down rather quickly after starting if there is a blatant fault in the hardware... rather than take longer if there is simply a problem with voltages.

  10. #10
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    Re: Badly Seated RAM?

    Cheeky edit and bump:

    Thought I'd go back to the basics and debugged my minidumps. 8/10 probable cause was ntoskrnl.exe, 1/10 probable cause was ntfs.sys and 1/10 probably cause was ecache.sys.

    If anyone has some information on these that'd be most helpful.

    Also Prime95 has run without any errors for 5 hours now.
    Last edited by Kev32; 29-07-2009 at 06:20 PM.

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    Re: Badly Seated RAM?

    Sounds like your RAM does require more than standard voltage to run at its top speed. It is very common. Pretty much all the RAM I have ever owned has required more than stock voltage to run at its rated speed.
    Your PC being stable is not a yes or no, its more each bit that is moved from one place to another has a chance of not arriving correctly. If there is a major hardware fault, or you have turned speeds up lots without raising voltages then the chance of the bit arriving correctly gets so low that the PC won't even finish POST. As the voltages get close to what is required for the speed then the chances for each bit get better. So the average time for the error to show itself goes up. It is still a game of chance though.

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    Re: Badly Seated RAM?

    I think I found the problem...

    PC crashed citing a sudden rebellion of windows, every time it tried to boot up from windows it would BSOD with MEMORY_MANAGEMENT error. Did this 5 times before I gave up trying to get back into windows and run memtest86+ again.

    9730 errors in the first 2%. So I removed one stick of RAM, ran memtest and no errors up to 65%. Got impatient and swapped that stick for the other stick. 13200 errors in the first 5%. Tried the faulty stick in my brothers PC with memtest and it too found several thousand errors.

    Am I pretty safe to say I have found the culprit in this spiel? I always thought there was a problem with my RAM from the day I bought it 3 months ago as it would not let me boot up windows when it was in 1066mhz mode. (my motherboard automatically ups the voltage, it's one of those awesome rampage series oc boards). Now it seems that after a few months of usage as well as constant memtest and stress tests it's brought out the full faultiness of the module.

    Guess it's time to RMA again for the second time in my life, and all a week before i37! :X

  13. #13
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    Re: Badly Seated RAM?

    Blargh, to make matters worse I bought it from ebuyer, no wonder it broke. I can't be assed dealing with their RMA service which I've heard takes quite long.

    Could anyone recommend me,looking at my system, a decent alternative/upgrade?

    http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/4GB-%...d-CAS-9-9-9-24

    perhaps?

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    Re: Badly Seated RAM?

    you will find ebuyer RMA faster than scans, and there refunds 10 times faster.

    i usually chase it up a couple of days after they log it in and it gets turned round within the week.

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    Flat cap, Whippets, Cave. Clunk's Avatar
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    Re: Badly Seated RAM?

    I have a brand new set of these that I'm selling, probably cheaper than the ones you linked to.

    http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductID=822488
    Quote Originally Posted by Blitzen View Post
    stupid betond belief.
    You owe it to yourself to click here really.

  16. #16
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    Re: Badly Seated RAM?

    Hah how much you selling them for Clunk? The ones I linked are £56 quid and the ones you linked are £182!

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