Weird memtest behavior...help!

My girlfriend has an Asus A8V-VM SE mobo with an AMD FX-57 proc (old skool, I know ). She installed Windows 7 x86 on it and it was running fine, except windows couldn't find drivers for her USB wireless adapter and her onboard sound (I can't understand that last one...it's just a standard Realtek HD Audio chip...). I went over and installed drivers for both...and got BSODs a few minutes after restarting, every time. The two weird things were, the BSODs were different every time (can't remember exactly...IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL_TO was pretty common though), and they never referenced drivers (I got ntfs.sys once).

Long story short, I did an in-place reinstall of windows. I installed her network driver...and got BSODs again.

Now, here's where it gets weird. I ran memtest on a whim and got thousands of errors on the first pass. So I pulled out her RAM (2x1GB PC3200...Corsair value RAM) and put in one stick in channel A. It completed one pass of memtest just fine. I put the same stick in channel B and it passed. I put the other stick in channel A, then in channel B, and it passed both times. I put them both back in together, and it passed after 20 minutes. So I rebooted into windows...and got a BSOD within 5 minutes. So then I ran memtest again without changing anything...and got a million errors withing 10 minutes.

What's going on?!?!

try a 2T command rate

if that doesent work, its got lifetime warranty right?
could be a heat thing too

Niku-Sama said:

try a 2T command rate

if that doesent work, its got lifetime warranty right?
could be a heat thing too

Click to expand...

It could be heat...she's got an FX-57, an 8500GT, and a 300W PSU crammed in a case that's like 1ft^3, with ZERO airflow to the CPU HSF. The thing is, it's been running fine for years...the likelyhood that any hardware would fail right after I installed drivers is pretty unlikely...

Try running both sticks in single channel. I had a set of memory worked fine in single but BSODed in dual channel.

Martel said:

Try running both sticks in single channel. I had a set of memory worked fine in single but BSODed in dual channel.

Click to expand...

I did. I tried each stick by itself in each channel, ie, stick 1 in channel A, stick 1 in channel B, stick 2 in channel A, stick 2 in channel B. I only ran one full test each time, but it always passed.

The IMC is on die with those right ? Give it a extra bump in vcore
Check the caps on the Mb

testing with both sticks at the same time is more stressful especially dual channel. you usually have to up northbridge/cpu imc voltage to get things stable with memory if it works single channel. if it's unreasonably high then caps.

which mem test are you talking about? if it's windows based, maybe a memory controller driver is causing this.

I think the 300watt PS is crapping out on you. Temporarily switch to a higher wattage, say 450 if you can and run windows like that. With the temps going up I bet your getting ripple effects.

Well I have a stupid idea (Not dumber than a response like "Update your drivers)

Anyway I'm thinking if at least one of the BSODs referenced to NTFS.SYS there *COULD* be something wrong with the hard drive, I had a similar issue a few months ago, turns out it was a bad drive.

If you have a spare 40GB or something try making a partition and installing Windows then doing the drivers.

Just a thought as I can't seem to think of anything else and I'm miffed by the MemTest errors.