Once a distant dream, Now a bitter reality.

[excypher]

Hi Guys,

Firstly, apologies for the wall of text below you, But I'm totally at a loss now, and would really appreciate anyones help who thinks they may have some input, I'm competent so please don't spare the jargon

I have been having major problems with a build of mine for some time now, how long you ask?
Well it was about a year now, i'ts never worked properly since day one, so frustrating it has been I've been scraping by on half it's potential through fear of approaching this fragile little... creation of mine with any attempt to fix it.

The components are as follows:

Gigabyte X58-UD3R-USB3 Mobo - The Ud3r, selected for being popular and 'stable'
Intel I7 950 @ stock - the staple in the gaming PC diet of 2011, again, a popular choice
Corsair Vengeance 12gb 1600 CL9 Triple - The bane of my existence, I'll get to that.
Sapphire 1gb HD5770 X2 crossfire - recently seems to be having some overheating but probably just clogged

Hard drives, case, blah blah I won't bore you with the rest.

Basically this build has never liked working with all 3 sticks of RAM in, on first build it would not even POST with all 3 slots populated, eventually windows got on a drive after I took all but one stick out, replacing this stick with any other combination of sticks or process of elimination yielded no results.

Eventually I contacted the company I ordered the parts for and got an RMA, a painful few weeks later and I was told the RAM was fine (which when I ran memtest on for 18 hours did not fail) but the motherboard was duff so they were sending me a new one, they also told me the CPU checked out fine so this eased my tension somewhat.

Since I've had the new board, much of the same problems have been presenting themselves. Again it will not run for long with all 3 sticks populated, 2 sticks makes it semi-reliable and it will only crash about every hour, 1 stick hasn't had any problems... yet.

There was a time when life was good, I borrowed a 4gb dual channel set of 1600mhz ripjaws, when these were installed I didn't experience a single error, bsod or any kind of drama whatsoever.

I had to return these so I concluded maybe the RAM wasn't OK, so I ordered a second set of the corsair vengeance, thinking if it WAS a problem with the motherboard I would have 24gb ultimately, with all 6 slots populated.

Upon initial installation of the 3 new sticks everything seemed grand (with a copy of windows already down) My joyous celebration turned to ash very quickly however, when I attempted to install a fresh copy of windows.

To cut a long story short a same routine of testing and swapping of sticks yielded no results, the computer will not even entertain booting if all 6 slots are populated. It seems much the same story as the previous set.

Now I'm faced with two possibilities, either the motherboard is duff, but what is the likelihood of getting two duff motherboards? Or the RAM is duff, and again, what's the probability of that happening?

There is a third possibility that the ram simply isn't suited to the motherboard, I checked and found that the board "should" do it, being that it could run 1600mhz and had XMP. There were also numerous cases and builds that had used this with success. It was generally considered a good combo, hence why I bought it.

In my attempts to stabilize the ram I've also tried cranking the voltage (1.65 as opposed to the profiles 1.5, as this seems to be indicated in a lot of places that talk about this RAM) and this has provided no benefits, under clocking the ram or loosening the timings also does not help, I am not pushing these modules beyond their specifications.

Now after a year has gone by, I've got some money in the bank, and I've decided enough is enough.

Right now I can either try a new kit of ram, I was looking at this one As It's stated on gigabytes memory compatibility list and it's also quite the cheap option at only £60

OR I get a new motherboard, possibility moving away from this gigabyte nightmare and back into the safe cosy embrace of an ASUS board, The only problem with that is cost, So I'd rather not plumb for another one of those.

So I'm asking you now, if it were you, what would you go for? A set of RAM that could be made redundant or an entire new motherboard that may not solve the problem?

Thanks for reading, if you did, if not, that's cool, I understand

Ex

 

[ahnilated]

One thing that is really odd but worth testing. If you have hyper threading running try turning it off and test your system. I found with one of my i7 920's that if I left it on it would cause issues. Shut it off and it is perfectly stable.

 

[excypher]

Thanks for your reply! I have tried your suggestion and whacked all 12gb of ram in there. It's booted back into windows and all seems well, I think you might have cracked it!

Time will tell of course, the real test is whether windows will install

Thanks again.

 

[djscribbles]

Two things:

From reading your post, it sounds like you thought your RAM was the issue, so you bought more and kept the presumably faulty ram in the system... Did I misunderstand all that? I should hope you took the old RAM out, put in your new modules, and tested it that way first at least.

What is your PSU? It's not neccessarily the first place I'd jump for troubleshooting what you are seeing, but if the PSU is a junker it may not be giving you stable enough voltages or enough current to properly run your system.


It kinda sounds like this system has never been functional at all, but you also say the video cards have been overheating lately, which would imply usage, so are you simply being dramatic or is the system really just a blue screen machine?

 

[Raiddinn]

Take out both the video cards, sell them, and use 1x a 6850 instead. Crossfire sucks anyway for a whole lot of reasons and not the least of which is that it can cause stability issues.

You might as well not add fuel to the fire. The most stable and best running systems almost always have just 1x video cards.

Secondly, Kingston RAM has hugely lower failure rates than Corsair. Corsair RAM averages more than 5x the failure rates of Kingston RAM which is tied for the lowest (the other lowest is Crucial).

Money where my mouth is, I own both Crucial RAM and 1x a 6850 video card.

That doesn't necessarily mean that the Kingston RAM will make the computer work any better. 3x Kingston sticks has less fail rate than 1x a Corsair stick, but the fail rate is still there. There is also no guarantee that the Corsair sticks are failing.

It could be the motherboard RAM slots that are bad. If so, no kind of RAM you get would fix it.

You should be able to test this pretty easily, though. Just boot with 1 stick in slot 1. If it works, then move it to slot 2 and try to boot. if that works then move it to slot 3 and try to boot. Do that for all 6 slots and if some work and some don't you can opt not to use the ones that don't work.

You may have to break triple channel mode, but there is no need to worry about that, your computer will be like 98% as fast as before and if it is 100% stable it is worth it.

You can download a program called Memtest86+ (with the +) and run it on each stick of RAM one at a time in slot 1. That would rule out whether any sticks are bad.

If you have 1 bad stick and 1 bad slot or whatever, it could very easily cause these sorts of problems. If you weren't controlling for the variables then it would be nearly impossible to determine the root cause.

 

[smorizio]

sound like ram timming issue or voltage issue with that kit. i would run cpu-z and get the model of the dimms and look at the jdec info. this is the info that mb going to read and use to set up the dimms. the xpm profile is going to be the fastes speed but most time you have to bump the ram voltage to 1.6-1.65 for the xmp to work unless the ram is spec that way. i would also look to see if your kit is on the mb qal list for ram. and check the ram vendor web sight to see if that kit should work. most ram vendor give life time warranties on there ram. what i would do is do two rma.. the first one send the kit your not using back first and see if they can change the ram for one that on the mb qal list. let there tech support know there ram not bad it an issue with that kit and your mb and that using two stick of another ram set worked fine.

 

[Raiddinn]

I would rather see him test all his RAM first and if he figures out 3 sticks are bad then he can put all those in one package and ask for new ones while keeping the 3 that work for current use.

 

[excypher]

Thanks for your replies, I'll try and answer all the questions:

Yes I replaced the first set of RAM with the second set, I'm currently using the 2nd set (all 3 dimms) with hyper threading turned off... so far so good.

PSU is a 750w Corsair Professional series, rails all reading solid, no problems there it seems.

I may have been a little dramatic, the machine is not 90% BSOD (now) it used to all the time when populated with more then 1 stick (it didn't matter which stick this was)

Have tried running the ram in 1.6 and 1.65 respectively with no change in performance or stability, currently running at 1.5 with no issues.

Thank you for the suggestion to try the individual slots, I will try this when I get it apart.

Most likely i'll get rid of the 5770's, Looking at replacing with a single slot, as you say, for efficiency and stability and the like.

Memtest has been run on both sets of RAM for 18-24 hours with no reported errors, the first kit was also tested overnight by scan computers.

An update for you: Running prime 95 now, worker 4 stopped after 5 minutes of testing presenting 100 warnings, 0 errors, The warning is "ILLEGAL SUMOUT"

Thanks again for your replies.

 

[ahnilated]

Thanks for your replies, I'll try and answer all the questions:

An update for you: Running prime 95 now, worker 4 stopped after 5 minutes of testing presenting 100 warnings, 0 errors, The warning is "ILLEGAL SUMOUT"

Thanks again for your replies.

This sounds like your processor might be messed up. Are you sure that you have the latest version of Prime 95?

 

[Raiddinn]

I don't know much about Prime 95, but I did some checking on Illegal Sumout and it sounds like a processor problem. As if it is supposed to add two numbers together and it gets the wrong result. Like 1 + 1 = 3.

Here is the thread I was reading.

http://www.overclock.net/t/1153880/fx-8120-illegal-sumout-help-please

In any event, this could probably still have to do with having an old BIOS or using a stick that is technically bad.

I would still try to make sure your BIOS is updated and I would still do the RAM tests, 1 stick at a time with Memtest86+

 

[excypher]

Hi folks,

As predicted it was only a matter of time after the prime 95 error, now were back to square one. The computer BSOD's, were back to running just 1 stick.

The version I have of Prime 95 was current as of January 2011, so this could be a possibility, but the crash soonafter kind of confirms something wasn't right.

The computer will run stable with 1 stick of RAM in it. No BSOD's or anything, as it is doing now

The BIOS was updated in January and remains the latest version.

I heard somewhere that this gigabyte board sometimes had issues with bent pins for the cpu, Which could cause issues.

This CPU has run prime 95 before for 24 hours with no errors, I'm not entirely inclined to blame it.

 

[Raiddinn]

Do the RAM tests and see what happens. One stick at a time with MemTest86+. The sticks should be able to run just fine in the left most slot for these purposes.