3XS Cyclone RAM Fault

[Winterlove]

Yay! My fixed machine has been picked up by the onsite delivery team this morning. Less yay is that they can't actually deliver it to me until Monday or Tuesday. I'd hoped to have it back for the weekend. Oh well.

[PeteG@Scan]

Give him a call as I know he's traveling about with it currently. He might be saying that because he can't see you with it tomorrow, and hasn't been able to reach you today, but if you get back to him this afternoon you might be able to arrange something still for today if he's not left your area yet.

[Winterlove]

Understood. I'm trying to find out his number, as he left a message on my home number while my wife was out, so I don't have direct access to the message he left.

[Winterlove]

Managed to reach him. Too late to arrange a delivery today, and he is fully booked up tomorrow, so I've expressed a strong preference for as early on Monday as possible.

[PeteG@Scan]

Ahhh, sorry to hear that. Hopefully then he can accommodate you have it with you Monday A.M.

[Thorbog]

The question is; what did you do to fix it?

[B.E.A.N]

I knew my luck would run out and this morning it's only showing 4GB instead of 6GB

Invoice number E1474290
Mem 6GB 3x2GB CMT6GX3M3A2000C8 Corsair GT
Machine has been fine up till today but there is one thing every thing tells me the system has only 4GB but when I ran 3DMark06 it recognises 6GB and give or take a couple if marks it is still giving me the 26642 that it has on the last couple of tests (sep/oct)

John

[Thorbog]

It could be that RAM isn't a limiting factor for those 3D mark tests so you will get the same results regardless.

Despite having 2GB I only became aware of a problem when Warcraft suddenly became completely unplayable and was running at 5fps with massive HDD activity in places where it had previously run at a steady 60fps! Just browsing the web though everything was running beautifully!

I have put that little system monitor gadget on my desktop. You know the one that shows CPU and RAM usage?

It just means that upon booting up at a quick glance I can tell how much RAM I'm running immediately without having to click on anything.

On a cold boot it will be at 50 to 60% due to have 2GB. If I then shut down so that the fans stop and power up again it will read 21%.

I dare say many punters who have only lost 2GB are quite happily running windows and playing games with 4GB of RAM and they have absolutely no idea about this and have never raised the issue with scan. Especially so given how easily the problem can disguise itself. They only have to shut down and boot up again for whatever reason and the system will have it's full quota of memory.

That is what happened to me. I got the system out of the box, plugged it in, checked it booted up and then shut it down again to finish connecting a few things up and pushed the base unit into place. I had no idea that it only had 2GB at that point as it was running quick enough. Then I booted up from warm and for the rest of the day had 6GB. It wasn't until the next day when I booted from cold and started gaming that I realised something was badly wrong.

[B.E.A.N]

Yes, MOH,Mafia 2 and FalloutNV are only using 55% of the recognised 4GB and without this thread I doubt if I might have noticed the problem as soon, as the system is still as fast as when it first arrived.

[PeteG@Scan]

The question is; what did you do to fix it?

In winterloves case he's now (or will be in a few hours) an owner of a x58 UD3R board in replacement for his original. Since I've swapped it through we have another new bios from ASUSthat has had somewhere in the region of a 90% pass rate in overclocked testing with the D-E set up and is 100% at stock, it's coming down to voltages being tweaked in the background now, and ASUS are still working hard to nail it for us.

[Winterlove]

I hope it will be a few hours too. As of 11:50 or so we've not had a phone call to tell us when it'll be delivered. Beginning to get a bit concerned.

[Winterlove]

Wow, timing. Just got a message from my wife that it has arrived. I will fire it up this evening and let you all know how things are.

[Thorbog]

I'd be happy with just 100% at stock to be honest.

I buy a new PC each year and then sell the old one to friends or family to part fund the new one. At the moment mine has as much value as a box full of nuts and bolts as I can't see anyone buying it off me the minute I tell them two thirds of the RAM goes missing.

At least with the new BIOS I could just load the stock profile and sell it as a perfectly good working PC.

So I'm looking forward to the new BIOS although if they can improve on the 90% when overclocked then that would be a bonus assuming my unit is in the 10%...

Can we have a copy of that latest BIOS now to see if we are in the 90%?

[Winterlove]

So. Got home, plugged it in, it booted. Did a bit of poking around to see what was what, checked the control panel to see if all the memory was there (it was!), started to refresh the Windows Experience Index ... after ten seconds or so it BSODed, memory fault.

On the off-chance it was a fluke, I restarted, decided to try restoring some backed-up data from the machine I'd been using while this was away being repaired. Copying was progressing ... BSOD.

Uh-oh, thought I. I decided that since the machine had been travelling around for a few days in a car, the RAM may have worked loose a bit. So I took it all out and reseated it, started again.

It has stayed up for 90 minutes, surviving the file copying and getting a new Experience Index Value (it reckons the main disk is slower now ). One oddity is that the when I booted it with a USB external hard drive installed it decided that that was now Drive D and the RAID mirror (originally D) was now Drive F, and it does not seem to want to change its mind back again, annoyingly, even if the external USB drive is not plugged in.

Still, all looking better now. I will keep an eye on the RAM situation.

[B.E.A.N]

This morning it's back to 6GB. I have restarted 3 or 4 times and still 6GB. I'll keeping monitoring to see if it happens again.

[PeteG@Scan]

Can we have a copy of that latest BIOS now to see if we are in the 90%?

Just questioned Sanjay about this, and he says that everyone he's dealt with should have received it by now. If you haven't then please drop me a P.M with your email and I'll fire it over this afternoon for you.

It has stayed up for 90 minutes, surviving the file copying and getting a new Experience Index Value (it reckons the main disk is slower now ). One oddity is that the when I booted it with a USB external hard drive installed it decided that that was now Drive D and the RAID mirror (originally D) was now Drive F, and it does not seem to want to change its mind back again, annoyingly, even if the external USB drive is not plugged in.

Still, all looking better now. I will keep an eye on the RAM situation.

Eak!

I assure you it was stable here... hopefully it was just the ram that worked loose in transit and nothing more serious. Let us know should anything else untowards occur

You can change the drive lettering around again in computer admin in control panel quite quickly and it should stick again. Whilst not ideal I fear windows has already made up it's mind and needs telling this time round!