New machine unstable

[z0mbi]

Hello, I just built a new machine for gaming and work. I've built several machines in the past. I'm ok with the mechanics of building a machine, but I'm lousy on the troubleshooting and software side of things.

It's an i7 930 using stock heatsink, with an ASUS NVIDIA 480, ASUS P6X58D mobo, 12GB Corsair dominator DDR3 1600 RAM, Corsair 850W PSU.

The problem I'm running into is the OS (Win7) is unstable. In one day, the finder has crashed on me, I've had one blue screen, Flash crashes all the time, Firefox crashes often, Vuze crashes often, and the three games I've tried all CTD upon a few minutes of playing.

I've never had problems like this before, all three of the PC's I've built in the past just magically worked. Any help or suggestions on things to check would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

-John

 

[117killer117]

How many ram sticks do you have?

What type of case do you have.

 

[hunter315]

Did you set the timings and voltages manually for the RAM? I highly doubt there is a 12GB kit of dominators that will run probably at 1.5V. Once you set the timings and voltages if its still unstable run memtest for a few passes and see if it gets any errors.

 

[z0mbi]

I'm running 6 sticks of TR3X6G1600C8D Corsair Dominator RAM. I was just reading up on them and it says they should be running at 1.65V. I'm going to check the voltage in the BIOS right now.

I'm running a Coolermaster Cosmos case.

 

[117killer117]

That motherboard only officially supports 12 gb of ram at maximum 1333mhz.

Try clocking it down to 1333.

 

[z0mbi]

Oh, that's dissapointing. Oh well.

So I clocked it down to 1333 and set the timing to 8,8,8,24, but I'm confused as to the voltage. It should be set to 1.65V as I understand it, but I'm not sure where to set that? There is a QPI/DRAM Core Voltage setting, and a DRAM Bus Voltage setting. Which one do I change?

 

[z0mbi]

I set the QPI to 1.35v and the bus to 1.64v judging from what I've read around, and everything seems to be running fine. My games are running, anyway. Thanks guys! I didn't even know where to begin to look... at least now if I have any further problems I have a basis to start a search from.

 

[117killer117]

Try testing the stability of your pc before you up the voltage because 1.65v is the max voltage that you can use before you can burn out the memory controller on your i7.
If your system is still not stable then ram voltage is under AI Tweaker, scroll down to where it says *****please key in numbers directly!***** .

 

[z0mbi]

Well I was able to play Mafia2 for about 30 minutes, but it still crashed. Much better than the 30 seconds it lasted every time I tried it before.

Is it ok to lower the RAM voltage randomly? Should I set it to 1.5 or something? I really don't know jack all about tweaking numbers in the BIOS and I don't want to blow something up by accident.

 

[z0mbi]

So the crashing was still happening, just not as badly as before for some reason. So I ran Memtest and got some errors, ran each stick individually, and it turns out one of the sticks was bad

So I'm running on 6GB for now until I RMA the bad stick, but everything is running completely stable now! Thanks, the both of you, for your assistance. I never did a memory check before, I've never had bad memory before, so this was all new to me, and your questions and theories really helped a ton.

 

[z0mbi]

Best answer selected by z0mbi.

 

[hunter315]

I had the same thing happen to me in the spring, but Gskill was nice and quick about it and even with shipping between new york and california i had my system back up and running in under a week, so while it sucks to wait its good to know what the problem was.