RAM Memory Troubleshooting & Diagnosis Part 1 Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,606 words · ~8 min read
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welcome to an episode of lonus tech tips where I share my frustrations with you a
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little bit I have as some of you know I have what I call the Linus Edition RAM
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this is some older ocz memory that was custom done for me you can see there
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isn't even a part number on it or anything like that you've probably never
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seen a black and blue color scheme like this with an XTC heat spreader it was
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really really cool really special uh so I had 24 gigs of it that's 6x4 gigs and
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uh it's like the coolest thing ever I'm super proud of it it's awesome all that
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whatever it's uh broken now so I was running into issues where the computer
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that was running it you can see I only have five of the sticks here one of the sticks is known good and it's in my
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wife's machine right now so she has 4 gigs of memory which I'd love to
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increase so that when I have to Video Edit on her machine it's uh got enough
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memory and all that good stuff so what happened was her machine started blue
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screening randomly and I was only using
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three of the sticks in her machine at the time and so I pulled out memory I
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swapped memory until I found one that that that wasn't causing problems
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anymore and now I am left with the challenge of finding you know it's like
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out of five sticks now I have to find not only the one that I know is dead so
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this is the one that seemed to be causing the problems with her machine so
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what I did was I confirmed this one was dead by using prime95 blend and I'll
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show you guys the settings I'm using later um this is why I hate overclocking
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memory CU memory issues are so hard to diagnose and uh so hard to narrow down
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to what's working or what's not or what's causing the issue unless plus
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your the rest of your system is 100% completely Rock Solid I wouldn't even
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begin to touch memory cuz it's much much more finicky so that one that one's dead
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cuz what happened was I took four sticks and I ran them in Quad channel on this
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motherboard I set it to the settings I know the memory works at so 1600 C9 1.65
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volts uh default timings other than that uh ont command rate and I got errors
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after about 8 hours so I did every stick
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one by one all five of these sticks in dim slot one ran them individually at
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the same settings remember guys it's less stressful for the memory to run in
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individual mode than it is in a multi Channel mode so this is the only one
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that actually failed it failed after about 10 hours of prime 95 blend which
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is very frustrating because it makes the whole process take a long time so then I
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went oh yeah okay great everything must be good now so all I have to do now is
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take the four remaining sticks and run them in Quad Channel and it'll pass so
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after about 10 hours it failed which means that at least one of the sticks in
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here is still bad even though it was able to run on its own it can't run in a
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multi- channel configuration so since then I have taken this one out and I
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tried to run these three and it failed
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then I took this one out and I put this one back in and tried to run these ones
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in triple Channel and as you guys can see like people ask me all the time how
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long should I run my configuration in prime or some other stress test before I
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know it's stable and then I come back to them I say 24 hours or 48 hours they're
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like oh I ran it for 3 hours and it didn't you know fail so it must be must
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be okay then right no no no it isn't because you see here torture test can
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encounter an error 7 hours and 54 minutes in no problem so the settings
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that I'm using here so if your system makes a mathematical error it is not
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stable now that error could cause any number of things to happen it could
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cause a game to crash it could cause a program to kind of lock up for a second
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it could cause your entire operating system to corrupt you don't know what an
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error will do until you have an error and it does something so that's why I do
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not tolerate any errors in my machines and people who are like yeah yeah I
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overclock my CPU to whatever and it's pretty stable it's game stable no no
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game stable is not stable stable is stable so to show you guys the settings
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I'm using I'm using the blend preset and then I'm going custom and then I'm
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adjusting the memory to you to something near to what so I'd go with something
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like that i' go you know let's use 112 gab if we're going to have 12 gigs
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of memory in there so what I'm going to do now that I know I'm hoping it's only
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one more stick that's dead because they used to run in these settings just fine
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so this one remember I know this one's dead this one's going on the wall with
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the other legendary stuff so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to shut the
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system down like it takes days to
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diagnose a dead memory stick especially with these multi Channel configurations
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we have now where you can have up to eight sticks of memory in a desktop machine I mean it's ridiculous so now
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I've tested this this and this and I've tested this this and this and I'm still
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getting errors so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to put this guy back in
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and I'm going to take out one of these guys and we're going to see how that how
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that goes for us it's always important when you're testing this kind of stuff like if I put them in all the wrong
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slots then they might all be running in single Channel mode so you want to populate the uh the dim slots in the
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right order so there's there you go see they're all they're all labeled there so
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I need to make sure I'm populating A1 B1
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and where's yeah there we go and C1 in order to get this working so the
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system's shut down just going to go ahead and ground myself on the power
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supply here turn the power supply off just because you never know when the
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system's going to you know go ahead and just turn itself on when you're in the
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middle of working on it because it happens let me tell you that was a scary
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one I just like I plugged in a uh I plugged in a PCI Express card and the
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system powered on before I'd even finished getting it into the slot I was
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like oh yay dead card dead board they
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didn't die they were okay actually okay so there you go so now I'm going to see
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if maybe my stick B is dead it's important to label stuff I mean I can I
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can remember but I you know especially when all the memory looks the same it's
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important to make sure you actually do label things so anyway there we go so
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then we're going to power it back up and it's going to need another oops I need to turn my power supply back on sorry
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power it back up and hopefully it doesn't take another 8 hours to find the
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error again but I've already been working on this for days and it's been very frustrating so there you go guys
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how to diagnose memory problems takes a while mest 86 is
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another one but it used to be I mean just like prime it used to be a lot
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faster back when it didn't have to go through you know 12 16 24 48 gigs of
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memory in order to find out if there was any kind of problem and
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uh yeah memory yay don't forget to
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subscribe flyless Tech hips for unboxings reviews and other computer videos and I hope this has been helpful
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remember guys if you're having a stability issue with your system the
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things to check memory make sure your memory is 100% stable power supply if
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memory isn't the problem it's probably your power supply and then you move on
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to your motherboard and then you move on to it's probably a software issue unless
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your you know your video card driver is crashing or something very specific and you can go okay yeah that's probably the
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video card thanks guys take care