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Tom's Hardware > Forum > Motherboards & Memory > Memory > Getting BSOD with new RAM

Getting BSOD with new RAM

Forum Motherboards & Memory : Memory Getting BSOD with new RAM

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First of all, here are my specs:

Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
ASUS P5K Deluxe Wifi-AP Motherboard
2 x 2GB Corsair PC2-6400 800 MHz RAM Sticks
SOUNDMAX 7.1 Onboard Sound
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280
650 Watt Corsair TX PSU

Hello,

Yesterday, I replaced my computer's PSU, graphics card and RAM sticks. My old PSU was 350/400 Watt, the graphics card was a GeForce 8800 GTX, and 2 x 2GB of Mushkin RAM. I'm not totally sure on the specs of the old RAM, but they said HP2-6400.

I was experiencing some random restarts, so I did some troubleshooting and came to the conclusion that my rather old PSU was failing at high loads.

Additionally, I MemTested my old RAM and found that one of the sticks was faulty, in spite of never getting any memory errors, crashes or BSODs.

Anyway, I replaced said parts, and my system specs are now the ones listed at the top. I tried to run a lengthy game installation and immediately got a BSOD with the Memory_Management error.

Vainly hoping it was just a one-time occurence, I tried to run it again. This time the installation got about half-way before the computer simply froze.

The RAM are currently placed in sockets 1 and 3, but I've also tried in sockets 2 and 4 with no luck. It gave me another BSOD, PFN_List_Corrupt.

I tried reading online, and the consesus seems to be that both errors are an indication of faulty memory. It was at this point that I ran MemTest86+ to check if my new RAM were faulty, but everything checked out. I let it run for about 4½ hours, going through 8 passes. I've checked in my BIOS and downloaded CPU-Z, but all of my RAM settings look correct. My motherboard appears to have correctly identified the RAM and set the voltage, frequency and timing.

Even posting this thread for help is proving a challenge, as Firefox constantly keeps crashing as well.

Does anyone have a suggestion? Any help is greatly appreciated.

Reply to Anonymous
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Win 7 does this with RAM it doesnt like. It is known for it. Change the RAM to another brand and possibly different specification. Its a matter of getting the right type.

Reply to Wamphryi

Yeah, sorry, I forgot to mention the CPU. It's an Intel Core 2 Duo 3.00 GHz.

I replaced the RAM because they were a hand-me-down from a friend, and they're a couple of years old. I doubt they're still under warranty. Besides, I wanted an upgrade.

The RAM specs say timing 5-5-5-18, frequency 800 MHz, and voltage 1.8v. Both my BIOS and CPU-Z concur that all of those settings have been met by my motherboard, so I'm not assuming anything. Like I said in my post, I checked and verified the values.

Thanks for the answers so far, though.

Reply to Anonymous

I've tried running the RAM through Burnintest and Prime95, and my results are sort of inconsistent.

With one stick in slot 3, I got an error that said something similar to "Error reading data from RAM," which was supposedly a very serious errior caused by my RAM returning different data than it was given. Upon stopping the Burnin test, I got another Memory_Management BSOD.

I ran the same test on slot 1 and got no errors, but when I was shutting down my computer, I got a PFN_List_Corrupt BSOD.

When running Prime95, it doesn't take me long to get a "Rounding was 0.5, expected less than 0.4" error. This appears to happen regardless of which slots I'm testing and whether I have 1 or 2 sticks in. Reading online suggests that I have an unstable overclock, but nothing is OC'ed. Everything is stock. I've even tried upping the voltage slightly for both the RAM and CPU, which is what was suggested in the OC threads.

Reply to Anonymous
- 0 +

Corsair memory has lifetime warranty. Go to their site and go through the RMA. I replaced several Corsairs and they are totally pain free process.

Reply to LFaWolf

LFaWolf wrote :

Corsair memory has lifetime warranty. Go to their site and go through the RMA. I replaced several Corsairs and they are totally pain free process.



The old RAM weren't Corsair, they were Mushkin. Regardless, my friend bought them a couple of years ago, and has long since forgotten where he bought them from, along with the documentation. He simply replaced them with better RAM back in the day, and he didn't see a whole lot of reason to bother with RMAing them since he wouldn't be needing them.

As for RMAing the new sticks, I want to be sure that they're actually faulty and causing these problems before I go through an RMA. :)

Reply to Anonymous

first, try placing the sticks on slots 1 and 2 then try and boot.
slots 1 and 2 are the ones farthest out from the center of the board.
if that boots then the RAM will be in dual channel mode - general config is 1 and 2.
second, what are your exact motherboard specs on RAM, timing / latency.
if the old RAM is unreadable then the specs should be able to tell you.

Message quoted 1 times
Message edited by malmental on 09-26-2010 at 03:26:06 AM
Reply to malmental

malmental wrote :

first, try placing the sticks on slots 1 and 2 then try and boot.
slots 1 and 2 are the ones farthest out from the center of the board.
if that boots then the RAM will be in dual channel mode - general config is 1 and 2.
second, what are your exact motherboard specs on RAM, timing / latency.
if the old RAM is unreadable then the specs should be able to tell you.



I'll try running them in 1 and 2 and see if it helps any.

I'm not entirely sure if it's what you're looking for, but the mobo has identified them as Corsair TWIN2X4096-6400C5C, which is right. They're PC2-6400, frequency is set to 800MHz, the voltage is set to 1.8, and the timing is 5-5-5-18, all of which match the RAM's specifications, too.

Reply to Anonymous

Well, the system booted fine with the sticks in 1 and 2, but I got an error in Prime95 almost immediately. "Rounding was 0.5, expected less than 0.4," the same error I mentioned earlier.

Reply to Anonymous
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