NB Voltage Increase = Bad RAM?

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Frank Villasenor

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Straight forward question: Could increasing the Northbridge voltage cause RAM to go bad? If you believe so, could a 0.05 increase cause this? Or a 0.1v increase?

MemTest86+ is reporting that I have bad RAM; I was fooling around with multiplier overclocking. Is it possible that MemTest86 is reporting bad RAM because of the previous Overclock settings. I thought I reset all the settings but in case not, should I reset the CMOS and re-run MemTest86?
 
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Frank Villasenor said:Straight forward question: Could increasing the Northbridge voltage cause RAM to go bad? If you believe so, could a 0.05 increase cause this? Or a 0.1v increase?


Straight forward answer, Yes but at such a level it's pretty unlikely.
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Frank Villasenor

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Thanks for the response...

I know. But the truth is, there seems to be contention on "how" risky it is. Some says extremely -- a light overclock could fry the entire system and then I've seen people say they've overclocked for years and have never damaged a CPU (no mention of other components).

Motherboard is an ASRock 990FX Extreme3 and the RAM is Corsair DDR3 4x4GBs PC-1600. CPU is an FX-8350. A lot of people overclock this Chip so, I believe that a fairly light overclock shouldn't be the end of the world. But truth is, I don't know.

And I wasn't truly overclocking the NB. I read somewhere that sometimes when a system is unstable, slightly bumping the NB voltage can stabilize the CPU overclock. I became uncomfortable so I backed off. No real problem caused me to back off -- just wasn't comfortable with things.... but now the RAM is reported as Bad by MemTest86+
 
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TenPc

TenPc

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Why did you feel the need to use Memtest86+, were you having issues?
Memtest86+ is reliable but you do a certain number of passes for more accuracy.

Ram often becomes unstable when the sytem is used in the extremes.
What is your PSU make and model?
Sometimes an under voltage PAU can impact on the ram. If you replace a ram module, you might end up with the same problem later on.
 
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Frank Villasenor

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Crysis 3 locked up and 2 Chrome tabs days "He's Dead, Jim" -- both previous symptoms of the first time I had bad memory in the computer.

This lead me to run memtest.

Power supply is Apevia 680W ATX12V / EPS12V.

I'm working on identifying a replacement as it's been pointed out that the PSU might be causing issues with overclocking...
 
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Frank Villasenor

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I appreciate the path to your conclusion but it simply isn't right.

I have 16 GBs in the system. With Crysis 3, Windows and monitoring software running, I have over 10 GBs still available. I have so much RAM because I uses VirtualBox a lot.

So, while the RAM itself may not be bad (per se), it certainly isn't right. I'm wondering it if could be settings that haven't been revert or even the power supply causing an anomaly....
 
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TenPc

TenPc

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Virtual Box is a virtual drive and uses a portion of ram so you really don't have 16gb of ram for the OS (and game), only 10gb.
Anything "virtual" takes the ram volume away from the system to use, it also slowws down rthe processor as it has to bypass that section of ram allocation.
 
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toarranre

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Frank Villasenor said:Straight forward question: Could increasing the Northbridge voltage cause RAM to go bad? If you believe so, could a 0.05 increase cause this? Or a 0.1v increase?


Straight forward answer, Yes but at such a level it's pretty unlikely.
 
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