Need your help

[Yoshua]

I recently built a new machine. Well originally I was just going to replace some of the componants and attempt to salvage some of the older componants. But since then I've wound up replacing every componant. But I am still having problems.

The problem has been memory related, but I cannot pinpoint which device is causing the problem. It could be the mainboard, the memory or possibly the video card. But I haven't been able to narrow it down.

Prime95 ran for 10 hours without problems, as did memtest86.

I can boot to Windows and run regular applications without problems. The problems occur when trying to run 3D applications. I recently replaced the 3D card I was using with one from ATi, but the problem persists. It's not impossible that it'd be the graphics card, but given this was a problem before I got the card, it seems more likely to be something else.

Does anyone have any ideas of how I could pinpoint the source of this problem ?

My system:
AMD XP 3200+ CPU
512 MB DDR 400 Mhz Kingston ValueRAM (running in single channel mode, dual channel mode wasn't stable)
Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro 2 motherboard (using the 3/1/2004 bios)
ATi Radeon 9600 XT graphics card (128 MB version)
Seagate 120 GB SATA hard drive (can look up the model if it's relevant)
Samsung DVD-ROM
Windows 2000 SP4
DX 9.0b
All drivers are up to date, this is a fresh install of Windows 2000.

 

[jammydodger]

What is the nature of the problems that occur? Which 3D apps u using? You could try to slacken the RAM timings.

[Insert witty comment here]

 

[Yoshua]

I've been testing with Warcraft 3. I've tried other games, and they experience problems as well, WC3 just happens to aggravate the problem sooner than those apps.

What happens varies. Sometimes the machine will lockup and I have to hit the reset button. Other times the machine will just reboot by itself. Sometimes though the program will just exit with an error dialog saying it couldn't access memory and print the address (I can't find where it may log these messages though, and it wouldn't let me copy them). Sometimes I get a dump and sometimes I don't. This was the last error code I could get from the event log:
0x0000007f (0x00000008, 0x00000000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)

My memory timings are already pretty conservative: 8-3-3-3 CAS 2.5

I've seen this problem happen even when the CAS latency is set to 3.

 

[Yoshua]

Well, think I narrowed it down to one bad DIMM. I took them both out and tried each one by itself. One DIMM failed, the other one seems to be working.

Strange that this wasn't caught by POST and managed to pass all the memory tests I threw at it.