Hello all,
I built my own PC for the first time around 6 months ago (I had the knowledge, had just never built one from scratch before).
Here are the original specs for my PC:
I had to RMA my motherboard within the first week (was a total dud, never found out what the problem was with it) which was obviously disappointing, but I just chalked it down to a bit of bad luck; little did I know this was only the beginning. From then on, I started to experience BSODs every few days, with all sorts of error messages, and some with none at all. I tried debugging them using Windows debugging tools and it all pointed to memory corruption, only after extensive testing I found out that my RAM was perfectly fine.
My SSD however decided to conk out and I had to RMA that, Overclockers then told me they had discontinued the product so I couldn't get a replacement, fair enough.
I've had periods as long as a month where I've had no BSODs, where I honestly thought I fixed it. I thought it was a software problem at times, or it was down to my SSD, but unfortunately my system is still messing up.
Not wanting to give up, I was testing my RAM sticks individually for the hundredth time and noticed something quite curious in Memtest. In slots 3 and 4, my RAM speed is reported as 200MHz(DDR400) and in slot 2 it's reported as 666MHz(DDR1333). I'm not able to test slot 1 atm, due to my heatsink blocking it, I can put a different one in at some point to test it, but I don't think it's that important. My motherboard's RAM channels are slots 1 & 3, and slots 2 & 4, which make this all the more curious.
Another thing, when I have the RAM in slots 3 or 4, I experience freezing at the F12 boot menu, as well as countless BSODs. Whereas if I have the RAM in slot 2, it will never freeze on the boot menu, and I have only had one BSOD in a week (that's good for me).
Is this the sign of a faulty memory controller/CPU?
Sorry for the stupidly long post, I got a bit carried away
thank you to anyone who reads it.
EDIT: Just thought I'd include that my RAM timings and voltages are set to the manufacturer's recommendations.
I built my own PC for the first time around 6 months ago (I had the knowledge, had just never built one from scratch before).
Here are the original specs for my PC:
- Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5850 Extreme 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card
- AMD Phenom II X4 Quad Core 955 Black Edition "125W Edition" 3.20GHz
- Gigabyte GA-870A-UD3 AMD 870 (Socket AM3) DDR3 Motherboard
- OCZ ModXStream Pro 600w Silent SLI Certified Modular Power Supply
- Samsung SH-B123L/BSBP 12x BluRay ROM / 16x DVDąRW Lightscribe SATA-II Optical Drive - Black (OEM)
- OCZ Gold 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 1333MHz Low-Voltage Dual Channel Kit (OCZ3G1333LV4GK)
- OCZ Agility Series 30GB 2.5" SATA-II Solid State Hard Drive (I don't have this anymore)
- Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB
I had to RMA my motherboard within the first week (was a total dud, never found out what the problem was with it) which was obviously disappointing, but I just chalked it down to a bit of bad luck; little did I know this was only the beginning. From then on, I started to experience BSODs every few days, with all sorts of error messages, and some with none at all. I tried debugging them using Windows debugging tools and it all pointed to memory corruption, only after extensive testing I found out that my RAM was perfectly fine.
My SSD however decided to conk out and I had to RMA that, Overclockers then told me they had discontinued the product so I couldn't get a replacement, fair enough.
I've had periods as long as a month where I've had no BSODs, where I honestly thought I fixed it. I thought it was a software problem at times, or it was down to my SSD, but unfortunately my system is still messing up.
Not wanting to give up, I was testing my RAM sticks individually for the hundredth time and noticed something quite curious in Memtest. In slots 3 and 4, my RAM speed is reported as 200MHz(DDR400) and in slot 2 it's reported as 666MHz(DDR1333). I'm not able to test slot 1 atm, due to my heatsink blocking it, I can put a different one in at some point to test it, but I don't think it's that important. My motherboard's RAM channels are slots 1 & 3, and slots 2 & 4, which make this all the more curious.
Another thing, when I have the RAM in slots 3 or 4, I experience freezing at the F12 boot menu, as well as countless BSODs. Whereas if I have the RAM in slot 2, it will never freeze on the boot menu, and I have only had one BSOD in a week (that's good for me).
Is this the sign of a faulty memory controller/CPU?
Sorry for the stupidly long post, I got a bit carried away
thank you to anyone who reads it.EDIT: Just thought I'd include that my RAM timings and voltages are set to the manufacturer's recommendations.
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