Which memory brick is defective ?
Hello friends,
I have a memory issue with my Windows 10 PC. Sometimes (about every 3rd day) it throws a BSOD "faulty hardware", which seems to address - depending on MS docs - a memory problem.
The PC has a Gigabyte Z68X-UD7-B3 maiboard, equipped with 16GB of DDR3 RAM ( 4 x 4 GB all slots full). The board supports Dual Channel technology.
I've burned a boot CD with Passmark's MemTest 7.1 and ran the tests, they show 4 locations with single bit failures.
The addresses are
The motherboard manual (see here, page 16, chapter 1-4-1) tells
Am I right to suspect that the RAM brick in DDR3_1 is defective ?
Thanks in advace for your support
I have a memory issue with my Windows 10 PC. Sometimes (about every 3rd day) it throws a BSOD "faulty hardware", which seems to address - depending on MS docs - a memory problem.
The PC has a Gigabyte Z68X-UD7-B3 maiboard, equipped with 16GB of DDR3 RAM ( 4 x 4 GB all slots full). The board supports Dual Channel technology.
I've burned a boot CD with Passmark's MemTest 7.1 and ran the tests, they show 4 locations with single bit failures.
The addresses are
Hex Address Binary address Decimal Address
0x00022901d48 0000 0010 0010 1001 0000 0001 1101 0100 1000 579,870,024 (553.0 MiB)
0x00048be8386 0000 0100 1000 1011 1110 1000 0011 1000 0110 1,220,445,062 (1163.9 MiB)
0x00100995D60 0001 0000 0000 1001 1001 0101 1101 0110 0000 4,305,018,208 (4105.5 MiB)
0x001d00fda70 0001 1101 0000 0000 1111 1101 1010 0111 0000 7,785,667,184 (7424.9 MiB)The motherboard manual (see here, page 16, chapter 1-4-1) tells
1-4-1 Dual Channel Memory Confguration
This motherboard provides four DDR3 memory sockets and supports Dual Channel Technology. After the
memory is installed, the BIOS will automatically detect the specifcations and capacity of the memory. Enabling Dual Channel memory mode will double the original memory bandwidth.
The four DDR3 memory sockets are divided into two channels and each channel has two memory sockets as
following:
Channel A: DDR3_1, DDR3_2
Channel B: DDR3_3, DDR3_4
Am I right to suspect that the RAM brick in DDR3_1 is defective ?
Thanks in advace for your support
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Just for convenience ... the system is running for some years now, and I wouldn't bet anything that I could find a matching brick to replace the faulty one. In fact I've already ordered a brand new, faster 4x8GB set to replace the entire set and get some nice mem upgrade for my memory consuming activities like VMs etc .... ;-)
On the other side I hate to trash functional hardware and I hoped to detect the faulty one w/o doing hours of boring mem tests ... or at least get some tip which of the bricks could be the culprit ...
@rindi:
As I've already told, I ran Passmark's MemTest already. It comes as image for a bootable CD and is completely independent of the installed (and sleeping) OS. All addresses I've mentioned failed repeatedly in different test modes of that utility - in fact it reported in sum over 500 errors at these addresses, with the same bit failing at each specific address ... I ptresume there are faulty RAM cells at these 4 locations in one of the bricks. Here's a snapshot
-Snapshot.png
On the other side I hate to trash functional hardware and I hoped to detect the faulty one w/o doing hours of boring mem tests ... or at least get some tip which of the bricks could be the culprit ...
@rindi:
As I've already told, I ran Passmark's MemTest already. It comes as image for a bootable CD and is completely independent of the installed (and sleeping) OS. All addresses I've mentioned failed repeatedly in different test modes of that utility - in fact it reported in sum over 500 errors at these addresses, with the same bit failing at each specific address ... I ptresume there are faulty RAM cells at these 4 locations in one of the bricks. Here's a snapshot
-Snapshot.png
As noted, try one at a time and that will flush out a defective module.
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Sold the bricks without testing by myself (told in my ebay auction about the defect). Got feedback that one brick is dead, but no info which it was.
Solutions point the right way: Test every brick separately (or shuffle a bit).
Solutions point the right way: Test every brick separately (or shuffle a bit).
Thanks for the update and I was happy to help.
If there is no failure, your RAM is probably fine. If there are errors, remove all modules except one, then run the diagnostic again. Then the next and so on until you have the failing module. Once you have the failing module, remove all RAM except the failing one, but this time install it in another slot and test it again. I've seen situations where the modules were all good, but a slot on the mainboard was bad.