Faulty memory?

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Fitzy
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Location: Rockville, MD

Faulty memory?

Post by Fitzy »

I bought myself 512mb more ram yesterday, mostly to see if it would help speed up the loads in Vampire. I installed it and everything was great, the load times in Vampire were 3-4x faster. Then I had a CTD. I really didn't think much of it and started playing again. Suddenly my entire computer restarted.

This got me to thinking that maybe the memory I bought was bad, so I ran MEMTEST and sure enough there was an error. I ran it again just to double check, another error same spot. I tried reseating the new ram, moved it to a different slot both resulted in the same error. So I removed the old RAM to try the new ram in it's spot and no error through 3 runs.

I then removed the new ram, and put the old stuff back in. There's the error.

My question is could I have somehow damaged the old ram while installing the new? I didn't touch the old ram the first time I installed the new. Is it possible the old ram was bad anyway and I just noticed for the first time? My computer has been very stable. Does RAM even go bad all of the sudden?

I haven't tried Vampire with the 512 of new yet, that's next, I'm hoping the performance won't go back to what it was, but I'm not too optimistic. I'll have to convince my wife I need even more RAM :)
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Fitzy
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Post by Fitzy »

Can ram be fixed? Would it be worth trying the failing ram in the other slots? The error occured in the exact same spot every time, so I kind of think it's ruined, but I don't know. Could static have caused ram to fail? I didn't wear a static guard this time.

I'm assuming I did something wrong, it seems to coincidental that ram that worked for 2 years suddenly fails just as I install new. Unless it was flawed all along and I just never ran into the problem before.
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SirReal
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Post by SirReal »

Static electricity probably nuked it. Sounds like it's a goner. AFAIK, you can't fix a broken memory module.
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SquireSCA
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Post by SquireSCA »

Go into the BIOS and make sure that your memory settings are set to SPD.

Put in the new RAM and check that setting, and if you can, bump up the VDIMM voltage one setting and retest it and let us know if the problem persists...
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Fitzy
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Post by Fitzy »

SquireSCA wrote:Go into the BIOS and make sure that your memory settings are set to SPD.

Put in the new RAM and check that setting, and if you can, bump up the VDIMM voltage one setting and retest it and let us know if the problem persists...
The new RAM is actually in now and working, the old ram is the one with the errors, but I'll give your advice a try. I was really enjoying 1gb :)
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Fitzy
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Location: Rockville, MD

Post by Fitzy »

Same error no matter what settings I use in the bios and then an eventual "serious" error in Windows. I'll just buy another 512 and chalk this up to a painful lesson in static. Assuming that's what happened :)
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