Motherboard or RAM issue?

[shankmcduffer]

I put together a build about 3 months ago and have been having some very consistant stability issues; Not booting, BSOD's, Instability while gaming, pretty much the whole gambit.

I chose the Asus P7P55D-E Pro Motherboard and went with 2x2 GB Corsair Ram CMX4GX3M2A1600C8. And I updated the BIOS to the latest version.


I got the system operating fairly smoothly on one stick of RAM, so I turned off the unit and installed the second stick, and the computer booted directly into safe mode. I powered down the system and place my memtest boot cd in the drive and restarted. Memtest ran for 5 seconds before saying I had errors on both sticks of RAM.

So I removed, and individually tested both sticks of RAM in memtest and each checked out with no errors after 3 hours of test time each. Seeing that they both tested fine, I reinstalled both sticks and ran MemTest again, this time no errors at all.

My question is this, has anyone seen this type of thing before, and if you have could you please give me some advice on which direction to head.

Thanks in Advance

Mike

 

[T_T]

Welcome, Newcomer. There could be several reasons for the instability. Let's start with the more common ones:

1. QVL?
2. Voltage, frequency, and timing manually set?
3. Incorrect DIMM slot occupancy
4. Over Clocking?
5. Bad or failing PSU

How to address the above list:

1. Check the manufacturer's website for a Quality Vendor List, to see what RAM is known, by the manufacturer of the mobo, to work with your mobo.

2. Did you manually configure your RAM in your BIOS? if not, do so and then monitor the performance.

3. Are you certain that you placed the two sticks in the correct DIMM slots?

4. Are you over clocking your system? If so, try using default settings, and default settings with just RAM manually set.

5. Test your PSU with a digital multimeter.

 

[shankmcduffer]

T_T,

Thank you for your suggestions, here is what I have done. I checked both Asus and corsair websites to make sure the RAM was compatible, and both places checked out positive for compatibility.

I have let the computer auto select all options for suggestion number 2, although I did set the timing manually once and didn't notice a difference. But I am wondering if you have a more technical way of "monitoring performance" that I may not know about.

I have checked the manual and have both sticks installed into the right slots, A1 and B1.

I am not overclocking my system in any way.

And I have not tested my voltages with the PSU, that is a rookie mistake I guess, but since it was brand new I just trusted it, but I will get the Multimeter out tomorrow!

Thank you very much for your help, and I will post if the voltages check out good tomorrow.

Mike

 

[T_T]

In regards to #2, not setting your RAM values to spec is a very big reason for instability. While [Auto] is nice, it isn't consistent. With the [Auto] setting, you're allowing your mobo to decide what values to run your RAM at. This also means that the mobo will allow the RAM values to fluctuate. When this happens, you're not getting a consistent voltage. Also, setting only the timing is only effective if you set the frequency and voltage, too. These values are what the manufacturer has tested to be the best, therefore that is how you should use it.