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Potential bad motherboard?

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perithimus

Member
Joined
Jun 7, 2004
Location
Lynnwood, wa
I am just curious what you guys think. I have a gigabyte z97x-sli, and I was having some memory issues with a set of kingston hyper x ram. It would cause these video artifacts with just 1 stick. No memtest errors though.
1204141506_zps895d8ed5.jpg

I get a brand new set of corsair vengeance ram and run memtest overnight and get these errors
1206141106_zps9533e194.jpg

The errors I usually got in memtest were in red. I have never seen errors like this before. I am wondering with errors and issues with 2 sets of ram if it's just a bad board.
 
I would try to isolate the problem by using 1 stick at a time of the corsair ram, and if both are throwing errors, blame the board.
 
Well I tried that. One stick started throwing errors within 15 minutes. The other stick is running a few hours so far workout errors. Whats the chance of 2 bad sets of ram though?
 
I ran memtest in the other 3 slots for about 45 minutes each. No errors. The bad sticks were producing errors within 15 minutes.
 
No memtest errors means the Ram is fine. In most cases video artifacts are caused by a dying or just a bad GPU. That would be the first time I've heard that ram causes video artifacts.

Something like that would point me towards the investigation of the GPU. Your GPU is on its last leg. Do you still have warranty? I would test it out if you can on another rig and if that's not possible, I would most likely start an RMA process for that GPU.
 
No memtest errors means the Ram is fine. In most cases video artifacts are caused by a dying or just a bad GPU. That would be the first time I've heard that ram causes video artifacts.

Something like that would point me towards the investigation of the GPU. Your GPU is on its last leg. Do you still have warranty? I would test it out if you can on another rig and if that's not possible, I would most likely start an RMA process for that GPU.

That's what I thought. That's why I'm in the process of an rma for my gpu. I then started using the intel graphics. It still did it with one stick on the first set of ram. It went away after I replaced that first stick of ram.
 
That's what I thought. That's why I'm in the process of an rma for my gpu. I then started using the intel graphics. It still did it with one stick on the first set of ram. It went away after I replaced that first stick of ram.

Oh ok. Glad it went away.
 
Oh ok. Glad it went away.

Yeah but I bought another set of ram to use while I rma'd the first set and this brand new set is getting memtest errors on one stick. Just don't see the chances of me getting 2 bad sets of ram. That's why I was thinking maybe the motherboard was the issue.
 
Yeah but I bought another set of ram to use while I rma'd the first set and this brand new set is getting memtest errors on one stick. Just don't see the chances of me getting 2 bad sets of ram. That's why I was thinking maybe the motherboard was the issue.

Chances are largely in favor of the MB than, of a bad slot. Have you checked another slot with that same stick of ram? If it comes out with no errors than you have a bad slot. RMA the board than.
 
Very rare for another new set of sticks to go bad. Do you have any back up hardware to test?

Well I decided to try running memtest on the corsair ram that showed errors in the first 2 ram slots in the last slot on the board. Over 3 hours and no errors. I am going to try another board. I have a choice between an MSI z87-gd65 or an Asrock z87 Fatal1ty killer board.


EDIT: Well I got a brand new mother board and ran memtest on my corsair ram. Errors within 5 minutes. Damn. I guess I did end up with 2 bad sets of ram.

1208140340_zpsedw76ew1.jpg
 
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I ran a test on the newest version of memtest(silly me thought I was using that) with both sticks of ram. 7 hours no errors on memtest 5.1.0.
1208142135_zps1eupjhip.jpg
 
Well that's a good sign than. Have you tested the other set of ram as well?
 
I ran memtest in the other 3 slots for about 45 minutes each. No errors. The bad sticks were producing errors within 15 minutes.

You only ran it for 45 minutes? How many passes did you let run on each stick? I generally that software run for at least 4 passes. It usually takes hours.
 
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