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Strange problem with mem and Sandra. Please help.

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Mpegger

Member
Joined
Nov 28, 2001
Ok peeps. I've got a Cele 1.0a in my BX board and its been rock solid from 100 to 124fsb speeds. Once I hit 133fsb, SiSoft Sandra kept randomly "failing" the memory bandwidth test during burn in.

Now, both sticks are 256mb Cas2 PC-133 Crucial ram. I had both in this system with my old P3-700 oc'd to 933 and all worked fine (although I never ran Sandra with that setup). Now with the Cele @ 133fsb, Sandra just seems to hang randomly when its running the memory bandwidth test. No error windows or messages popup, and the system doesn't freeze. However, clicking on cancel and the close button does nothing to Sandra, it just appears that its still testing the mem. If I ctrl-alt-del, or choose shutdown from the start menu, thats when the program crashes my system and I need to hit the reset button or shut off the computer.

I just finished testing both sticks of ram by themselves and they both pass Sandra and 3DMark just fine. I haven't a clue as to why this would happen. Can anyone offer any suggestions? Or does Sandra get picky with large amounts of ram?
 
I can't help you w/ your problem but can tell you that I can run the Sandra memory test just fine w 2x 256mb of DDR memory.
 
Ok peeps. Further problems are now occuring. I ran both sticks through DocMemory through 4 loops and no problems there. I just tried booting into Windows and got a Protection error and had to reboot. I'm in Windows and all seems ok, although IE did crash as I was accessing this site.

I'm starting to think that maybe the Cele may not be stable @ 133fsb speed with the full 512mb of ram. However, its been rock solid up to 124fsb @ stock 1.5 voltage. I was able to boot into Windows @ 1.5v which is when the random failures with Sandra would occur. I've already upped the voltage to 1.6V, but still Sandra randomly fails the mem test with the full 512mb of ram. A single 256mb stick seems to work fine, and it doesn't matter which stick I use.

I'm totally confused as to what could be causing the problem. If it was the mem, by this time I would have figured out which stick is giving problems, but both check out fine. Does anyone have any ideas?:confused:
 
Might be the cpu not liking the speed or getting too hot.
Might be the pci divider isn't set to 1/4 or the video card dosen't like the agp speed if it's a agp card but most will do ok.
 
Im thinking the cpu is the culprit. But damn! This cpu made it all the way to 124fsb with no voltage adjustments! Now, at 133fsb with a +0.1 voltage, its still isn't stable, and temp have gone up to nearly 5C above board when crunching (which really isn't a bad temp).

Its strange though that with only 1 stick of mem, Sandra doesn't clunk out, but I didn't really do any long term testing with only 1 stick, just long enough to run Sandra and 3DMark.

I'm going to keep the cpu @ 1.6 volts and @ 124fsb for now to help it further burn in. Maybe another couple of days worth will help it be stable @ 133fsb.

And btw, all my pci cards and agp card work great @ 133fsb with a 1/3 pci divider. I didn't even realize I had it on the 1/3 divider till nearly 6 months after I had set my previous cpu to 133fsb. Whoops. :p
 
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