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BehemothJackal
Gerbil
Topic Author
Posts: 60
Joined: Tue Feb 24, 2009 2:11 am

RAM Issues...apparently

Sun May 13, 2012 7:42 pm

First off the specs:

Intel Core i7 2600K
ASUS P8Z68-V Pro/GEN 3 (updated to latest firmware)
Corsair Vengeance 12GB @ 1333 (mobo downclocks)
AMD Radeon 6970
OCZ Vertex 3 120GB (updated to latest firmware)
WD Caviar Black 1TB
WD Caviar Black 2 TB
Corsair HX750 PSU
LG Blu-Ray Burner

I'm back!!! Ok, so I thought I had fixed all my issues. Seemed that I had a bad stick of RAM, which I removed from the mobo. Computer would boot fine, reinstalled windows drivers and software, BSODs stopped altogether, and life was good. Fast forward 1 month. Suddenly out of the blue BSODs started reappearing citing MEMORY_MANAGEMENT and NTFS.sys. Going into my BIOS I would see that my motherboard kept messing with the clock speeds of RAM, PCIe Bus, and CPU. Every reboot they were all over the place. I would keep trying to turn it off, but the motherboard would keep overclocking.

I ran Memtest and found it found billions of errors within seconds. (rough estimate)

I found that the "TPU" switch was enabled, which would have the motherboard attempt to overclock stuff automatically. The manual was backwards on that one. The diagram showing enabled was actually disabled and vice versa.

Once I disabled the switch the BSODs became less frequent, but I'm still having them coupled with software crashing issues. Firefox crashing out of the blue, graphics card drivers install failing at the same spot, Windows Gadget Manager crashing on startup sometimes after an hour...

Do I need to run Memtest with each stick individually to find if I have a faulty one? What if it comes up with errors on all of them? Is my motherboard frying my memory? When I first put together this build I had no faulty RAM as far as I could tell, then I had one bad one, now I might have more? In my 10 years of building computers I've never had any RAM related issues, and now they are kicking my butt. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
 
Ari Atari
Gerbil First Class
Posts: 145
Joined: Wed Jan 26, 2011 3:00 pm
Location: Earth

Re: RAM Issues...apparently

Mon May 14, 2012 10:49 am

As much as you won't like it, testing each individual stick one at a time is the only way to find which one is faulty, and it's always the last one you try. If you've got errors on all of them, you've got trouble somewhere and I would think the mobo is to blame.

But to me, MEMORY_MANAGEMENT and NTFS.sys appear to point to the hard drive/SSD not the ram. Maybe try running a hard drive scanner like HD tune or something similar.
 
Trellot
Gerbil Team Leader
Posts: 298
Joined: Sat Dec 18, 2004 1:01 am
Location: California

Re: RAM Issues...apparently

Thu May 17, 2012 5:56 pm

Ari Atari wrote:
But to me, MEMORY_MANAGEMENT and NTFS.sys appear to point to the hard drive/SSD not the ram..


Yes, I would start my troubleshooting efforts along these lines as well... :)

~ Trellot
-ASRock Z68 Extreme3 Gen3 LGA 1155 Intel Z68 / Intel Core i5-2500K
-XFX Radeon HD 7970 3072MB, GDDR5, PCI-Express 3.0
-Corsair Enthusiast Series TX850 V2 PSU / Corsair 600T case
-G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB / Hitachi Deskstar 750GB
 
BehemothJackal
Gerbil
Topic Author
Posts: 60
Joined: Tue Feb 24, 2009 2:11 am

Re: RAM Issues...apparently

Thu May 17, 2012 6:35 pm

Thanks for the advice everyone. The NTFS.sys BSOD does not appear anymore at all. It's MEMORY_MANAGEMENT 100% of the time now. I'm going to Memtest the RAM individually this weekend (plus I ordered more for my other build, so I'll swap em out for testing purposes).

I also have another SSD, a brand new Samsung 830 256GB that I can plug in a go to town with.

Additionally, I read online that some people with a similar config to mine found that it was the 2600k's memory controller that was messed up and was causing the BSODs. What do you know, I got an extra one of those that I can test out too. Either way, I'll approach it one after the other. Going from easiest to hardest.

RAM < Processor < SSD

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