Pc crashing since RAM swap

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Hiya,

My PC has been working fine for a while till yesterday when I replaced my RAM.

My cpu was running o/ced at 3.8ghz for a few months and crashed rarely. After some tests I found out that one of my OCZ RAMs was faulty.

Four weeks later and I finally got the replacement. Installed it in the pc and that's where all the problems started.

PC hangs/crashes a minute after loading windows 7. Sometimes during the bios when I was trying to reset all the settings.
I've reset the pc at default/stock settings and it still crashes/hangs.

I even reinstalled Windows and I've gotten 2 different BSODs so far. One with the error message "page fault found in nonpaged area" and the other was something about "irq not less or equal"

I ram Memtest for an hour (1600 8-8-8-24-1n @ 1.66v) and it passed with no errors.

Any ideas what might be causing this? I initially thought it was the new RAM, but it seems to be doing Ok in Memtest86.

Advice appreciated.

PC specs:

Asus P6T SE (latest bios)
1x ATI 5870 (cat 10.10)
i7 920 @ stock atm.
3x 2gb OCZ 12800 (running at 1200mhz 8-8-8-24 @ 1.60 atm)
cpu watercooled, temps reach 70c tops with prime95.
Antec 850 PSU
 
First thing you do is run memtest86 on each individual stick. Make sure you have your voltages set correctly in the bios. Use the sticker on the side of the ram to determine what is the specified voltages.

If the sticks are not happy send them back.
 
I had a few problems last year with the OCZ Gold RAM, the second set would pass Memtest but the system would fail at stock setting's ect, after a some RMA'S later it was the second set of OCZ Golds giving me grief. Using Patriot Viper without problem.
 
Thanks for the advice so far.

I've just tried testing each ram stick on memtest86.

None of the ram sticks showed any error messages, however after 8-12 minutes memtest86 just froze for every single one of them. Only thing that was updating was the blinking "+" at the top.

I'm using this ram.

Also noticed the timer in memtest sometimes lagging behind then speeding up to catch up.

Tested at 1600mhz 8-8-8-24-1n @ 1.66v (mobo can't do 1.65v), everything else at default/stock settings.

The 3 ram sticks were tested in one dimm slot so far...
I'm trying again the tests on a different dimm to check if there's any difference.

edit: memtest86 froze after 29 mins (95% on 2nd pass) with 1 ram stick in dimm2
 
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Sounds like your replacement RAM has worse compatibility with your system than the RAM you had before.

I had both the above mentioned faults with a stick of RAM on an older machine, I swapped it with a stick from work of the same type and speed and never had any further problems, funnily enough neither did the machine in work. Seems that the RAM just didn't like my machine. Maybe it's a similar problem to yours.

Must be a pretty serious problem if it crashes the machine in BIOS and memtest86.
 
I've been memtesting for the last few hours.

It seems to be stable when running 1600mhz 8-8-8-24-1n @ 1.7v rather than the recommended 1.65v

Will leave it running for a few more hours before jumping to any conclusions.
 
Grrr...

This is getting annoying. Memtest86 freezes after 1-2 hours with any ram stick plugged in individually in any dimm. Still no errors in memtest though.

Tested at 8-8-8-24-1n with both 1.66v and 1.7v

In barely lasts over 2 minutes in windows before freezing.

At this point I'm not sure if the ram, mobo or cpu is faulty.

Any advice on what to do next?

@Tealc: I checked Asus' ram QVL and they list my OCZ 12800 ram as compatible and I've been using the same model/make for the past 9 months. Only reason I RMAed it was that one of the sticks was faulty.

Rara
 
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