Intel i7 2600k broken by 1600 RAM?!

[mikeeb]

Hey guys. So let me sum up my problem real quick:

I bought Corsair DDR3 1600 RAM to go along with my Intel i7 2600k Sandybridge, after reading on here that it would work. My mobo is the Gigabye GA- p67 UD4- B3 LGA 1155

A few weeks after building my computer, I started getting random blue screens. Sometimes it will work fine for a few hours and sometimes i have to restart it every 5 minutes.

I just called Intel and they told me that their processor cannot work with DDR3 1600 RAM, due to the processor being the controller and the RAM is too fast or whatever.

The guy told me to buy new RAM that is 1333 1.5v and try it out, and if it still did not work he would send me a new processor, however I really do not have the money or time to do that. I run a recording studio and I am up the creek without a paddle right now.

Anyways, he mentioned something about overclocking that would potentially work, however silence is paramount due to the recording, and its not like I need it any faster. Plus, I have NO idea how to overclock and need this computer to last a long time before breaking. Truthfully, I don't want to void my warranty either and am just scared.

I am not trying to provoke some argument on whether overclocking hurts or does not hurt your computer, I just want to know if any of you guys would maybe be able to help me out here with a solution. I would really really REALLY appreciate any suggestions, that would also not hurt my computer.

Thank you guys so much for the help and I really appreciate it

 

[bavman]

Erm I'm not too familiar with sandy bridge and overclocking, but you should have no problem running 1600 ram with your CPU. Download and run memtest86+ to make sure your ram is not going bad. Also go into BIOS and check what speed your ram is running at and the specific timings. Make sure they match the manufacturer specifications and if they don't change them to match.

 

[mikeeb]

Erm I'm not too familiar with sandy bridge and overclocking, but you should have no problem running 1600 ram with your CPU. Download and run memtest86+ to make sure your ram is not going bad. Also go into BIOS and check what speed your ram is running at and the specific timings. Make sure they match the manufacturer specifications and if they don't change them to match.

Thanks for the answer friend. What do you mean by manufacturer specifications? By the manufacturer specs my ram and cpu wouldn't work, at least that is what an intel Representative just told me.

 

[lordvj]

I guess the ram is defective. Nevertheless , what was the voltage rating on the 1600Mhz RAM ? I suspect 1.65V, I might be wrong. Anyways, have you tried running this ram at 1333mhz ? it should run at 1.5V at this speed. Change it in the bios. Also run memtest and prime95 ( blend mode ). If you're still getting bsods/crashes you have bad ram

 

[mikeeb]

I guess the ram is defective. Nevertheless , what was the voltage rating on the 1600Mhz RAM ? I suspect 1.65V, I might be wrong. Anyways, have you tried running this ram at 1333mhz ? it should run at 1.5V at this speed. Change it in the bios. Also run memtest and prime95 ( blend mode ). If you're still getting bsods/crashes you have bad ram

I am looking in the bios and it says that my mem is running at 1330.78 MHz, the CPU temp is 29.0 degrees C, the Vcore is 1.224V, and my DRAM Voltage is 1.536 V? It seems like that would be everything they would want, no? What makes you think it is the RAM and not the CPU? I will try to run those tests but it will probably freeze.

 

[mikeeb]

Let me add that this was all just regular settings. I do not know enough to change any of this. If the CPU changed the RAM speed and stuff i have no clue, but i did nothing :/

 

[lordvj]

Those numbers look normal. how many DIMMs do you have ? have you tried using a single dimm?

> What makes you think it is the RAM and not the CPU?

because CPUs are less likely to be defective than RAM

 

[mikeeb]

Those numbers look normal. how many DIMMs do you have ? have you tried using a single dimm?

> What makes you think it is the RAM and not the CPU?

because CPUs are less likely to be defective than RAM

Do you mean how many sticks of ram do I have? If so, I have 4 4gb sticks for a total of 16 gigs

 

[mikeeb]

I guess the ram is defective. Nevertheless , what was the voltage rating on the 1600Mhz RAM ? I suspect 1.65V, I might be wrong. Anyways, have you tried running this ram at 1333mhz ? it should run at 1.5V at this speed. Change it in the bios. Also run memtest and prime95 ( blend mode ). If you're still getting bsods/crashes you have bad ram

I am currently running the prime95 stress test in blend mode. How will I know when it is done and what the result is?

 

[lordvj]

better run memtest once to know if something is obviously wrong. then run prime95 for a few hours , if no crashes or bsods occur then its gotta be stable

 

[lordvj]

memtest will take about an hour or more for 16gigs of ram

 

[bavman]

I very much suspect its your ram because if your cpu was defected you'd be having much bigger problems than BSODs every couple of hours. With that said memtest86+ is what you need to be running because prime95 will mostly put the stress on your cpu.

http://www.memtest.org/


Another way is to take all the sticks out and boot up with 1 stick run prime95 for a while and repeat for the other 3 sticks.

Also while looking through your bios is there a X.M.P. option anywhere? You might wanna turn it on and see if that helps

 

[jemm]

Perhaps 16GB RAM is too much load for the memory controller to handle at 1600Mhz?

You still can run these memories at 1333Mhz tough, as someone pointed out.

 

[mikeeb]

Hey guys. I just went through each stick, putting them in the same slot each time to see if any of them worked. Each time the computer froze, for every single stick. This has me thinking one of two things. Either the slot I used on the motherboard is broken, (I am going to try them all in a different slot now) or something else is up that has to do with the cpu. For some reason the memtest would not get booted from the CD, even though i extracted the ISO and burned it onto a CD. When i would try to boot from the CD it would just go say booting from CD and then go reguallarly into windows. This is extremely frustrating so if anyone has any ideas i would really appreciate it. In summation, each stick alone still has freezes. It is highly unlikely they are all broken. Three times it occured almost immediately after opening up a browser and searching, and the other freeze was on the log in screen

 

[mikeeb]

I just turned on that XMP thing, and it changed the frequency of my RAM from 1333 to 1600. That is the only change I saw. I am going to test it out now with one stick of ram and see if it changed anything

 

[Mfusick]

Hey guys. So let me sum up my problem real quick:

I bought Corsair DDR3 1600 RAM to go along with my Intel i7 2600k Sandybridge, after reading on here that it would work. My mobo is the Gigabye GA- p67 UD4- B3 LGA 1155

A few weeks after building my computer, I started getting random blue screens. Sometimes it will work fine for a few hours and sometimes i have to restart it every 5 minutes.

I just called Intel and they told me that their processor cannot work with DDR3 1600 RAM, due to the processor being the controller and the RAM is too fast or whatever.

The guy told me to buy new RAM that is 1333 1.5v and try it out, and if it still did not work he would send me a new processor, however I really do not have the money or time to do that. I run a recording studio and I am up the creek without a paddle right now.

Anyways, he mentioned something about overclocking that would potentially work, however silence is paramount due to the recording, and its not like I need it any faster. Plus, I have NO idea how to overclock and need this computer to last a long time before breaking. Truthfully, I don't want to void my warranty either and am just scared.

I am not trying to provoke some argument on whether overclocking hurts or does not hurt your computer, I just want to know if any of you guys would maybe be able to help me out here with a solution. I would really really REALLY appreciate any suggestions, that would also not hurt my computer.

Thank you guys so much for the help and I really appreciate it

 

[mikeeb]

I very much suspect its your ram because if your cpu was defected you'd be having much bigger problems than BSODs every couple of hours. With that said memtest86+ is what you need to be running because prime95 will mostly put the stress on your cpu.

http://www.memtest.org/


Another way is to take all the sticks out and boot up with 1 stick run prime95 for a while and repeat for the other 3 sticks.

Also while looking through your bios is there a X.M.P. option anywhere? You might wanna turn it on and see if that helps

So far, turning on this X.M.P mode has caused my computer to not crash thus far! I may be jinxing it, but it was freezing every 3 seconds before. Now it seems to be okay for the time being??? If This freezes, I am going to turn it off and then continue to test the second port on my motherboard for the RAM. If that one works, I can conclude the first port for RAM on my mobo is busted. If it does not, I will continue on to the other two. If the other two dont work, I will conclude it is my CPU that is busted. However if it does work, then my motherboard has a few busted ports and needs to be fixed. Now my question is, since X.M.P mode is on, should I enable any other settings to make sure that I dont mess up my computer. I dont know if this is overclocking or not, but I want it all to run smoothly. Thanks guys and so far so good!!!

 

[bavman]

X.M.P. is settings for high performance ram (usually anything above 1333 mhz is considered high performance) so it changes its timings and speed to run at what its supposed to (1600mhz). You dont need to tweek anything else.

 

[x Heavy]

XMP is the first item to enable with fast ram.