Ventrilo Help!

[Dawgdoc]

OK well I am officially stumped....

I made another new Memtest iso disk.

16 boots.

I tried each individual ram stick by itself, in each of the 4 dimm slots. 4 rams sticks and 4 slots so 16 attempts.

Not a single one loaded into memtest.

Put the disks back into the laptop and whammo. Memtest loaded immediately.

I KNOW I dont have 4 bad sticks of ram. I KNOW that all 4 dimm slots are not dysfuntional. I KNOW that the iso disk was burned properly and runs in a different computer.

Any suggestions on this nonsense?

 

[ratbuddy]

What version of Memtest? What BIOS version?

 

[Dawgdoc]

What version of Memtest? What BIOS version?

P5K deluxe BIOS version 1005 released 2/25/09.

Memtest86+ v3.5 released...earlier this year? Downloaded from here: http://www.memtest86.com/download.html

 

[Dawgdoc]

Aha! Some progress.

Your questions regarding BIOS made me think that perhaps one of my BIOS settings was interfering. I really had not changed much at all since this is a computer I just put together, loaded defaults and only changed a few settings for RAID/etc...

Anyhow.....loaded setup default and now memtest is working.

Stick #1 in slot #2 is a no go though! Now to figure out if its the slot or the ram.....

LOL....

Thx.

 

[ratbuddy]

Easy enough, just try the other sticks in that slot, and that stick with the other slots

 

[Dawgdoc]

How long for each stick do you think?

Id say normally like 24 hours but to be perfectly honest Im not sure I want to spend 4 days testing my ram....

3 hours per stick satisfactory ya think?

And I made a mistake on the last post. It was 1 stick in slot 1, and 1 stick in slot 3......

Whatever.....Ive got to perform some intensive ram tests, but I think that the ram is the overall problem believe it or not.

I booted into windows with 1 stick of ram in dimm1 and logged onto vent to get some feedback from my gaming buds and they said that the mic sounded fine........

Go figure.

 

[ratbuddy]

If the RAM is that screwed up, it'll error out before 3 hours even. I'd just take the stick that failed and try it in another slot, and the slot that failed, and try it with another stick. How fast did it fail when you first got memtest running?

 

[Dawgdoc]

It failed immediately on booting into memtest. Like.....5-10 seconds maybe? Memtest didnt show and error but I had a random shutdown and restart. That sounds pretty dang fail to me

But like I said in the previous post i was wrong in what was in there when it failed. It wasnt 1 stick in slot 2, it was 1 stick in each of 1 and 3. I just forgot what I left in there.

So I tested slot 1 stick 1 for 2 full passes (about 45 mins) with no errors. For giggles I put stick 1 into slot 3 and at least for 3 or 4 minutes it was good. Went back and put stick 2 into slot 1 and its at 1 pass + 15 percent and good so far.

Im curious what is going to happen when I put these same 2 sticks into the same slots that caused the powerdown and restart before.

 

[Dawgdoc]

Ok well I definitely have some interesting stuff going on here.....

Stick #2 was zero errors on 2 passes in slot 1. So I took stick #1 and put it in slot 3 with Stick2 in Slot 1.

Same thing....powerdown and reboot like 5 seconds into memtest.

So I take Stick2 out of Slot1, and run Memtest with Stick1 in Slot3....and so far its 10% good in memtest with no errors but its saying that its DDR3 instead of DDR2....

Its correctly displaying my chipset as P35 though. I would think it would have enough inherant chipset knowledge to realize DDR3 would not be possible in P35.

To me, this means that Slot3 is borked, no matter if I find errors or not.

 

[Dawgdoc]

OK so I am more lost than ever now......

Slot #1 - All 4 sticks went for 2 passes (roughly 45 mins per stick) with zero errors.

Stick....errr 1 or 2? (have to check notes) went in slot #3 for 2 passes with no errors.

I put stick 1 in slot 1, and stick 3 in slot 3 and I get a powerdown and reboot within 5 seconds of memtest loading.

I put stick 2 in slot 2 and stick 4 in slot 4 and I get a powerdown and reboot within 5 seconds of memtest loading.

Huh?

So if each memory stick passed individually, that without any doubt means that each stick is fully functional and without any errors or at least within lets say 99% of that?

And if the motherboard wont accept more than 1 stick of ram in any slots so far, then can I infer that means that the motherboard dimm slots are screwed up since we say in point 1 that all sticks work fine solo, so that means they work fine overall and its not a memory problem?

Or...is that logic flawed and if I cant get any 2 sticks to work together then there still could be a memory problem within any of those sticks even if they did pass an individual 2 pass memtest??

My head is starting to hurt......

 

[Automata]

If they pass individually, that means the sticks are good. If you can't do more than one stick, then it is most likely the board.

 

[Dawgdoc]

Yea the slot #3 reported DDR3 on my P5K deluxe is more than a bit disturbing to me as well.

Ok so I can feel confident that my ram is ok, and that the motherboard has crapped out on me. This makes sense to me considering some of the short term problems I have been experiencing.

What bother me now....and bothers me alot is what the hell was causing the issues before I switched out motherboards, and is it still in my system somewhere?

Perhaps I just got unlucky with a bad mouse, and a corrupted windows install. But...when I use 1 stick of memory with this current borked mobo and log into vent everyone says I sound find.....

I think I am going to keep the ram, get a new mobo, get 2 new HDs and put these 2 HDs into my questionable hardware pile and look at them again at some later date if I need a HD. That way, I will have a new mobo, a choice of a variety of s775 CPUs that I can switch out in 10 minutes (yea for D-tek promounts for the fuzion!), 4 sticks of ram that have been memtest proven for 2 passes, new HD, same GPU which is only 3 weeks old and cant possibly be contributing to any of these issues, and the same PSU.

Who here thinks that there is any realistic chance that any of the crap Ive mentioned here could be from a PSU that is dying?

I dont......should I be more concerned and try to prove my PSU is 100% functional? Swapping out a mobo is a PITA, but snaking this PSU and all of the wires out either to retest, replace, or whatever is a road Id rather not travel down unless its something that truly needs to be done.

 

[Automata]

I have no reason to suspect the power supply from the info you provided. You could try one stick then loading up the system (CPU/GPU) and seeing if the problem comes back.

 

[Dawgdoc]

I installed a new mobo and HDs today.

Gigabyte EP45 UD3P mobo, and 2 X Barracuda 7100.11 750gb for a RAID 0 setup.

After install I went into BIOS, checked temps, all looked good.

I had 2 sticks of RAM (slot 1 and slot 3)

For giggles I said...let me see what happens when I run a memtest like this with the new mobo.

5 seconds in I had a powerdown and reboot.

WTF!??!?!?!? SERIOUSLY???

Is there ANY chance at all this this is from a CPU issue? Im going to put in a different CPU and see what happens but....

I guess there is a chance that testing each mem stick by itself might not show some errors/problems that might only show when running 2 or more at a time????

I dunno.

I thought I was confused before but now I am REALLY confused and frustrated.

 

[Automata]

It is possible, I've never seen that behavior before though...

 

[Automata]

I've never seen nor heard of issues like what your having, my bet is memory.

 

[Dawgdoc]

Best guess.....CPU or memory problem?

Im installing a different CPU right now to see if it happens again.....

 

[Dawgdoc]

Different CPU same result.

Holy crap batman LOL...

Ok so the only things that are consistent across all 3 different rebuilds is the memory, and the PSU.

I STILL have a very hard time believing its the PSU.

Let me see if I have any other working DDR2 around here.....

 

[Automata]

Our responses got mixed up, not sure if you saw it.

 

[Dawgdoc]

I saw.

So I put in 2X1 GB of old Ballistix that I had lying around and wasnt sure if they were good or not.

So far so good. Populated slots 1 and 3, and Im 20% into the first pass with no powerdown and reboot.

I also saw that this mobo autovolts Vdimm at 1.8 which is way too low for either of the ram kits I am running.

Gonna hard powerdown myself and put in the 2 orig Mushkin sticks, boost the Vdimm and the Vmch and see what happens.

Sure does smell like bum ram though. But on the previous board(s) Vdimm and Vmch was not an issue as far as I can recall.