Suspected Bad RAM

[AcXen]

PC Specs:

Asus Crosshair MOBO
Athlon 64 x2 2411MHz
L1 Cache: 128K 19762 MB/s
L2 Cache: 512K 4910 MB/s
Memory: 2047 3040 MB/s
Chipset: AMD k8 ECC disabled
Settings: Ram: 401MHz (DDR803) / CAS: 5-5-5-18 / DDR-2 (128 bits)

(2) 250GB HDD RAID Striped
(4) 512MB Corsair XMS2 DDR2 sticks @ 1.7 - 1.9volts I believe

(1) DVD/CD-RW HP Drive
(1) CD-RW HP Drive
(1) Floppy

500 watt power supply in an antec case

Hopefully that's everything important to know at the moment.

This is the first PC I've ever built and it was working like a charm until recently. I had uninstalled FarCry and World of Warcraft from my PC about a year ago and recently attempted to put them back on the PC. When I did so I was getting errors during the installation of both games prompting me that something could possibly be wrong with the CD-ROM reading the disks correctly.

Now prior to those two games I never had a problem with the drives, so I attempted to install Warcraft III and it installed no problem. I gutted a drive from another PC laying around the house just to attempt to use a different drive and that one gives me the same type of problem. It will load anything but FarCry and WoW.

I was able to get WoW to load about 2 weeks ago by removing all but 1 stick of my RAM and that seemed to do the trick for whatever reason. However, I was getting crashes playing the game quite a bit. Error 132 for anyone that has the game. The solution I was told to attempt was to perform a complete reinstall of my OS and run memtest86+ to check the performance of the RAM.

While re-installing XP I did receive an error about a .dll file not being copied correctly from the CD during setup. I told it to retry and it seemed to copy everything correctly and I now have a fresh install of XP on my system. So I've run memtest86+ v1.70 and halfway through test #6 I was getting over 33000 errors.

I have yet to attempt each stick of RAM by itself with memtest yet, but will do so later tonight.

My biggest question would be does this actually sound like a RAM issue, or something bigger than that? Would faulty RAM cause the CD to have a problem copying over files?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, and while I'm not a complete moron concerning the BIOS I'm not that great understanding everything.

Thanks!

 

[evongugg]

Yes, you definitely need to start by replacing that RAM.
There could be more problems, maybe not.

 

[godless]

i just had pretty much the exact same issue with my ocz dual channel ram. it went bad, just one stick to be exact. i rma'd it. should be receiving it pretty soon. i had the same syptom of corrupt files or something missing from where i copied it. what happens is everything is stored first in ram then it transfers it to the hd. now if you ram is bad, the hd files end up being corrupted and unusable.

 

[godless]

Make sure you have the memory at the right voltage and the standard timings and speed in the bios.

if this doesn't work, then rma the ram if you can, if not get a new one.

 

[evongugg]

Make sure you have the memory at the right voltage and the standard timings and speed in the bios.

 

[bobbknight]

Down load cpu-z, check spd tab, set bios to JEDEC #2
Down load memtest, burn to cd.
Run memtest overnight, at least 6 hours, errors if any are in red to the right.
If even 1 error rma ram.

 

[bobbknight]

Down load cpu-z, check spd tab, set bios to JEDEC #2
Down load memtest, burn to cd.
Run memtest overnight, at least 6 hours, errors if any are in red to the right.
If even 1 error rma ram.

 

[AcXen]

I ran memtest last night and hit 33000 errors halfway through test #6. So I know there are errors. I haven't tested individual sticks by themselves at the moment though. I had all 4 in there when I ran memtest. Figured I'd probably go ahead and check 'em all one at a time just to be sure, but I was guessing based on 33k errors halfway through my first pass that they were probably all bad.

 

[bobbknight]

If errors occur with bios ram defaults, it's time to rma.