Memtest

[ajbrun]

If you get ANY errors on memtest, does that mean one or more of your memory sticks is faulty?

I ran it for 9 hours last night, and got 7 lines of errors. At the top, it said 16 passes and 16 errors.

Is it worth me taking out one of my sticks to find out which is causing the errors, or should it be OK as it is?

[Dougal]

I know that if memtest says "your ram is faulty" it may not be guaranteed.

Some motherboards (Asus K8V SE Deluxe >:E) bring errors up on memtest, put them into an Abit Nf7-S and no errors

[Dark Horse]

It also depends if your memory is overclocked or not. Memtest basically just runs loads of data through the memory and looks for errors in the resulting data. If you're getting errors at stock settings that isn't so good but if you've overclocked and get that many errors you will probably just have to tweak the fsb down a mhz or two or slacken some timings slightly and it should clear those errors up.

[mike_w]

I know that if memtest says "your ram is faulty" it may not be guaranteed.

Some motherboards (Asus K8V SE Deluxe >:E) bring errors up on memtest, put them into an Abit Nf7-S and no errors

It may be that the two different motherboards are doing something different e.g. supplying a different voltage, so that it works fine in one but isn't working 100% in another motherboard. If you are getting errors at stock speeds and timings, make sure that the voltage is at the correct setting.

[SilentDeath]

If you get errors, its a good idea not to boot windows as it can get corruped.

Change bios settings (timings/divider/mhz/voltage) untill it works

[Dougal]

It may be that the two different motherboards are doing something different e.g. supplying a different voltage, so that it works fine in one but isn't working 100% in another motherboard. If you are getting errors at stock speeds and timings, make sure that the voltage is at the correct setting.

I think its the BIOS. Its about 5 revisions out now but I cannot update as the board won't boot, it accepts the flash but says it has a checksum error and requests the original bios.

[ajbrun]

OK, a few of you have said about memory timings and overclocking and the like. I know almost nothing on those subjects, even though it is infact overclocked, and the memory timing are changed (how I don't know). Someone from these boards advised me, and I followed (possibly foolishly). Perhaps the best thing to do now is to undo the overclock etc by reverting to factory settings in the bios.

[Dark Horse]

Looking at your sig the overclock have isn't too high. The stock speed of the 2600+ barton is 1909 mhz and you have it at 2070mhz. Its probable that your fsb speed has been increased. This is basically the speed that the memory interacts with the processor at. With modern ram this is a bit more complicated as it is DDR Ram which means it is doubled somewhere along the line which gives rise to DDR400 ram which actually runs at 200mhz. The speed of the processor is derived from this by using a multiplication factor, in the standard case of the xp2600+ barton its 166x11.5 = 1909mhz. The reason I think your fsb has been increased is that most bartons have their multipliers locked at the stock setting because AMD didn't like people overclocking too much and laid the smack down.

I think your memory may be processor may be running at 180x11.5=2070mhz. Your memory should be easily be capable of running this speed as it is ddr400 ram = 200mhz so running at 180 should be no probs. It is possible that because the memort you have is made by different manufacturers it has different timings. As well as running at a set speed ie 200mhz each ram stick runs its data at a set of timings each clock cycle (ie each calculation). I'm afraid I don't no the very specifics of how ram latency/timings works but in essence lower numbers are more efficient so for two identical ram sticks running at the same speed (mhz) but with one sticks' timings at 2-2-2-5 would be faster the others at 2.5-3-3-6. The fours numbers are the main timings which I believe are in nanoseconds.

So if the one stick is rated at 2.5-3-3-6 while the other is at 2-2-2-5 they will both be fine running at 2.5-3-3-6 but not both at 2-2-2-5 as this is too "tight" timings for the slower rated ram. Even if the ram is running under its rated speed ie at 180mhz instead of 200mhz the wrong timings could produce errors as one stick may not be able to keep up with the either.

I may be barking up completely the wrong tree but I hope that makes some sense to you.

If you could download cpu-z http://www.cpuid.org/download/cpu-z-129.zip
which is basically just a processor information tool you could then post a screenshot of the cpu and mem pages we can see what settings you're running at and then hopefully diagnose things from there.

[ajbrun]

I'm sure I've done this before ages ago, but here it is again .

[SilentDeath]

At those timings and speed your ram should not be giving errors unless it is not getting the correct voltage.

goto bios and look on the hardware monitoring page at the DDR/ram voltage - could be between 2.5 and 2.8 on most non-overclocked systems.

Put the ram voltage up one notch if the monitoring page shows below 2.6v - that should fix it. 2.5v is the JEDEC DDR standard but 99% of recent ram has 2.6-2.8 as stock speed.