Is this a RAM issue or just drivers?

[Borealis]

At the weekend I added another 16GB RAM to the 16GB I already had, maxing out what my motherboard supports. It's TeamGroup Vulcan Red 2133MHz and I've been very happy with the first batch I bought last year, along with the lifetime warranty through OcUK.

It seems to be behaving normally, except Sunday night it BSODed and rebooted itself whilst I was out of the room. I was able to use Bluescreen Viewer to identify the stop code as 0X3B - SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION

At about the same time, the headphone socket on my Sound Blaster Z stopped working. I took out the new RAM and uninstalled/reinstalled the sound card, it still wasn't working, so I exchanged the card for an identical replacement (I bought it retail in the January sales). I installed the replacement card and have the same problem, so it's probably not a hardware fault, but a driver issue - apparently there have been issues with Creative drivers and SSDs.

I reinstalled the new RAM kit and everything seemed to be normal except for my sound issue, which I can live with for the time being.

Last night it appears to have randomly rebooted, again whilst I was out of the room, so I didn't catch it. There was no dump file, so I don't think it was a BSOD. Core temps are normal, so I don't think it was a thermal issue, especially as it rebooted itself straight away.

Coincidentally, my DVD drive isn't recognising certain disks, but I reckon that's down to an aging drive/faulty disks as I've had problems with this drive before.

Is there any possibility that the new RAM may have caused these problems, or is it just a coincidence?

 

[eddyr]

It definitely started after the RAM? Were there any other software/hardware changes done? It's possible it could be due to faulty ram, occasionally corrupting data silently and causing problems down the line. Have you tried running memtest on the ram? I would keep all 4 modules in to also rule out slot/cpu controller issues which might not manifest with just 2 modules. It will take longer but just leave it running overnight.

 

[Borealis]

Thanks for the reply.

My system boots fine every time now. Unfortunately, I've been in the bathroom both times something odd has actually happened - this machine has a sense of humour!

I did spend a lot of time at the weekend re-downloading my Steam library after I managed to accidentally wipe my games directory. It was during one of the downloads that both the BSOD and unexpected reboot occured.

There's been no weird stuff tonight, except for my DVD-RW which is refusing to read certain disks - not exactly an expensive part to change if needed.

I'll run memtest and see if it picks anything up.

I'll also switch the sound card to the only other free PCI-E slot I have and see what happens. It's currently in a PCI-Ex4 slot if that makes any difference.

 

[Borealis]

Update:

Just had another BSOD - 0x1A Memory management. This time I was sitting right in front of the machine.

I'm guessing that this suggests a RAM issue?

Strange thing was I was trying to play a youtube vid. The audio was very very distorted so I went to reboot. It BSODed the moment it reloaded windows.

If it's the RAM, then I'm not too bothered - I've had RAM go bad before and I'll RMA it. Hopefully it's nothing more serious!