Help with Memory Issues / BSODs

[noahfence]

First off, I'd like to thank any subsequent posters for helping out on this very frustrating issue!


(sorry for the long post)
Here's the story -

I decided to rebuild my PC at home so I could run games with a bit more eye candy. This is what I decided on:

Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 Motherboard (Socket AM3+)
850W PSU
EVGA GTX 570 HD
AMD FX 6100 6-Core Processor
(now the fun part)
12 GB VisionTek PC3-14900 CL10 1866EX Memory (4GB x 3 Sticks)

Foxwoods been very, very good to me. Wife didn't like it so much.

Anyway, right off the bat I was getting BSODs, BF3 was crashing, etc. I thought of course, after the fact, that maybe the PC didn't like 3 sticks in there. So I removed one, leaving the memory in slots 1 and 3. These are the two furthest away from the CPU. According to the motherboard manual, this is what I should have done. After a bit more tweaking with updating all drivers on the rig, everything seemed to be fine, even going so far as to protein folding my face off, 30K PPD (or somethin' I forget), which apparently meant my rig was extremely stable.

I decided then, that having 4 gigs of memory in the drawer next to the bed was silly, so I bought a 4th stick, bringing my total memory up to 16GB, with all 4 slots taken by identical memory sticks. However, it started BSODing on me again, MSRPC.SYS, NDIS.SYS, with all the associated mumbo jumbo that I'll post later on for those interested.

I've checked the temps, everything is OK. I ran the windoze memory diagnostic, everything checked out. So I'm flush out of ideas. I downloaded a program called "whocrashed" and this is their results:

crash dump file: C:\Windows\memory.dmp
This was probably caused by the following module: hal.dll (hal!HalReturnToFirmware+0xB2D)
Bugcheck code: 0x101 (0x21, 0x0, 0xFFFFF880009B3180, 0x4)
Error: CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT
file path: C:\Windows\system32\hal.dll
product: Microsoft® Windows® Operating System
company: Microsoft Corporation
description: Hardware Abstraction Layer DLL
Bug check description: This indicates that an expected clock interrupt on a secondary processor, in a multi-processor system, was not received within the allocated interval.
This appears to be a typical software driver bug and is not likely to be caused by a hardware problem. This problem might be caused by a thermal issue.
The crash took place in a standard Microsoft module. Your system configuration may be incorrect. Possibly this problem is caused by another driver on your system which cannot be identified at this time.

as well as:

crash dump file: C:\Windows\Minidump\033012-28189-01.dmp
This was probably caused by the following module: ntoskrnl.exe (nt+0x7CD40)
Bugcheck code: 0x101 (0x21, 0x0, 0xFFFFF880009B3180, 0x4)
Error: CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT
file path: C:\Windows\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
product: Microsoft® Windows® Operating System
company: Microsoft Corporation
description: NT Kernel & System
Bug check description: This indicates that an expected clock interrupt on a secondary processor, in a multi-processor system, was not received within the allocated interval.
This appears to be a typical software driver bug and is not likely to be caused by a hardware problem. This problem might be caused by a thermal issue.
The crash took place in the Windows kernel. Possibly this problem is caused by another driver which cannot be identified at this time.

One of these days I'd like to get this thing stable with all 16 gigs and maybe do a bit of OCing. I've never done that, so we'll see.

Anybody with any experience in these types of issues, please respond! Thanks for your help!

 

[Cigarsmoker]

I've noticed over the years that some MB, don't like having all the RAM slots filled. If it boot at all, it's pretty unstable. Take out 2 of 4 RAM sticks and viola, instant stability. My thinking (theory) is that the voltage drop/feed/supply/regulation with all 4 is screwing things up. On the other hand, some MB will take 4 sticks, OCed, without any problems.

Seems like your system is working with 2 of the 4 slots populated. So I'd suggest, running with 2 sticks (in slot 1 and 3) right now and run some stability tests with Prime 95. If it's stable after about an hour, take the RAM sticks out and insert into the other two slots (in slot 2 and 4). Stability test for another hour. If after the hour everything is stable, stability test for 8 hours. At that point you have a reference point.

Was the new ram you go identical to the existing sticks? It shouldn't matter but sometime it does.

BTW, always install RAM in pairs. This will allow the RAM to work in dual channel mode which is a significant performance increase.

 

[djscrew]

try bluescreen view

does it bluescreen after a fresh startup? could the problem be the temps of your ram? if they're fairly hot to the touch you may need a fan