Faulty Memory?

[nihilism]

Or am I doing something wrong?

Ok, first of all, here's my specs

WinXP SP2
AMD Athlon 3200+
Abit NF7-S V2.0 with latest bios revision
1GB Crucial Ballistix PC3200 Ram(2x 512's running dual channel)
A-Open, Nvidia 6800GT
All running at stock. No overclocking at all.

Basically, the ram is newly installed, upgraded from 2 x256 corsair pc 3200 dimms running duel channel.
The issue I have is when playing games, after around 30 mins to 1 hour, my pc bluescreens, then requires a re-boot, with windows saying it's recovered from a serious error. If I put my old dimms back in, it'll play games all day.

I'm guessing the new ram I've got is faulty?
Nothing is overclocked, and I'm letting the Ram run off its default SPD timings (2-2-2-8). Nothings changed in the bios, and I can't think of whats going on.

I've left a memtest a few hours, and it's coming back 0 errors, but when I re-booted, even though it shutdown correctly, it still said windows was recovering from a serious error.

Also, if the PC is just left within windows, it doesn't appear to crash, only when playing games.

Can you guys think of anything I can try to see if the ram is at fault, the rest of the system appears fine, and has just been formatted, it's basically XP SP2, and a few games to test with.

I'm guessing the memory isn't working when its under load, or a bit of the ram is faulty, I don't know that much about memory errors, but have done all the trouble shooting I can think of. The bios is the latest revision, so should work fine, and has no problems with my old dimms.

HELP!!! If I send the ram back, I have to wait about 14 days, and if they find it's not faulty, I get charged £20, as well as postage, so any further tests I can run to fully check the ram would be appreciated.

Thanks guys!

[Furton]

Try using one stick at a time and see if the problem occurs again on one of the sticks?

[nihilism]

doh!
didn't think of that.
I'll try that after It's memtest has ran a bit more. It's a weird one, that's for sure. Can't pinpoint what's going on, but the fact that the system is rock solid with the old memory points to some issue with the new ram. does a timing of 2-2-2-8 sound pretty normal?

[Mulda]

Silly as it may seem, it may be a cache fault on the CPU. If it is, both sticks will be OK if used individually.

[blockers]

Try running them in non-dual channel mode. Slots 1 and 2.