Weird MEMTEST results

[imacken]

One of my older PCs (that my son uses) started having random restarts, so I went on the trail to work out what was going on.
4 x Ballistix DDR2 500Mb RAM
Athlon 4400
Gigabyte K8NXP-9
ATI vid card (can't remember which!)
1) swapped the HDD. Problem still there. So I eliminated the HDD.
2) stopped any overclocking, and ran Prime95 for a few cycles. P95 ran OK, but problem still there. I eliminated the CPU.
3) ran ATItools to stress the vid card. Temps up to 100 degrees, but stable! I eliminated the vid card.
4) ran MEMTEST and got errors. Great - I thought - one of the RAM sticks is faulty.
Well, of course it wasn't straightforward.
I then ran MEMTEST with only 2 sticks under every possible combination of slots and sticks I could and there were no errors reported.
So, I put all 4 back in, and sure enough, the errors in MEMTEST came back.
Now, the other weird thing is that in the POST messages, the memory is identified as being Single Channel. Even with only 2 sticks (1Gb) in, it should report Dual Channel.
Anyone got any ideas on this?

 

[misterPK]

To me it seems like the next logical step would be to try testing the RAM in another machine. You might also want to check the voltage the memory is runing at too.

PK!

 

[EsaT]

Four DIMMs stress motherboard more than two so memory voltage might drop little too low.

 

[imacken]

Thanks guys, how do I check what voltage they are running at?

 

[Garyj881]

Increase the North bridge voltage and make sure they are running at the correct voltage/timings.

 

[SMAndy]

+1 on increasing RAM voltage. More chips needs more voltage.

to check, the new version of cpu-z may tell you. or you could just go through the BIOS to check the settings there. There should be a RAM settings page.