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Do I have bad RAM?

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matso

New Member
Joined
Oct 10, 2006
Hi everyone,

A big thanks to the forum in general, you've been helping me along with my new system recently. I have a question regarding whether I should RMA my RAM.

Corsair XMS2 2x1Gb PC6400 (5-5-5-12)
E6400
Gigabyte DS3 bios F6
Seagate 320 gb
Zalman CNPS9500
EVGA 7900 GS KO

Bios settings:
Vdimm +0.3v
MCH +0.1v
FSBv +0.1v
Mem 1:1
Mem timings auto

I have been gently overclocking my E6400 with good results, or I thought. The CPU has been stable at a FSB of 400 on Orthos for 12 hours (small FFT), however when I did Memtest 86+ overnight on the weekend I woke up to about 12 errors starting at pass 15.

I backed off the overclock and I'm now down to a FSB of 370, and I also put the memory timings in BIOS to auto to remove one more factor in the equation (was previously at 5-5-5-12 and even tried 5-5-5-18 as the bios reads the ram at this) and Memtest still gave me 2 errors overnight, again at pass 15 and then 26. I'm a little annoyed because, if I understand this right, I'm not even at the rated speed of this ram. This should be able to handle at least 800 Mhz with the appropriate timings without erroring, no?

So my question is, is my RAM crap or am I missing something along the way?

Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
matso
 
This particular board only has memory multipliers... going up on the ratio would probably only make the RAM more unstable since I would be running it at higher speeds.

But maybe I should try an FSB of 320 with a ratio of 2.5 to get 800 MHz memory speed, and see if it is still unstable.

Can anyone else comment on whether my RAM seems bad?
 
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