Random crashes in all games

Black Dog

Black Dog

Black Dog

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Joined
26 Oct 2002
Posts
1,979
Location
Reading, England
I have recently been getting lock ups in all games. I am able to ctr-alt-del and go to task manager and the game .exe is always not responding and I need to close.

This happens randomly, sometimes after 5 mins and sometimes after 2 hours! I have always built my own pc's for many years without a single problem but recently I upgraded to a Geforce 280, Corsair 750w and another 2 sticks of Geil memory.

I can only think it's something to do with them as my system was fine before. I got these random crashes on Win Xp so I bought Vista 64 and the same problems so I would cancel out a driver problem. I have the latest nvidia driver 180.64 and X-FI drivers + motherboard drivers.

Temps are fine for both GPU & CPU with all fans are spinning fine.

I'm leaning towards dodgy memory?, would a bad memory stick cause random crashes or would you get blue screens? Windows installs fine and general use of the pc is fine with the new memory installed so I'm not sure. My original 2 sticks of ram were running @ 4-4-4-4-12 1.8v without an issue, would installing another 2 identical sticks running at the same speeds & volts cause an issue? Would it make a difference to these settings installing more memory?

Thanks in advance.
 
Have you adjusted the north bridge / mch / RAM voltage to allow for the extra 2 sticks? A lot of people find they need to bump those up a notch to maintain stability.
 
No I haven't yet as I don't wont to play with voltage unless I have to.

Do you recommend upping up to 2.1v on the memory? Not sure about the chip or northbridge voltage though!
 
I'm not sure of what voltage the geil memory is rated at, but my corsair memory is supposed to run on 1.9v (which I have set it to), but the SPD data says it only wants 1.8v. Best off looking up the specs on geils website really, and setting the voltage/timings according to what they say.

My mobo is the P35-DS3L and it's been perfectly happy for the last 8 months having the northbridge and mch voltages knocked up by 0.1v.

EDIT: Just had a look on the Geil website and it says 1.8-2.3v, I'd try it at 1.9 then 2.0 if it's still unstable.
 
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yeah i second the up the volts idea, i had to up my volts on my northbridge and my ram.

Geil ddr2 800 ram running at 2.2v i think and my nb at 1.35 on ASUS P5Q
 
hopefully upping the volts should fix it, if not have you tried the system with just your original 2 memory sticks again in its original configuration. test the original 2 and then test the new 2 on their own.
 
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