Upgrade gone South

SeanW

Hi guys. I was wondering if anyone has ever seen something like this before or can help me figure out what is going on.

Recently, I upgraded my mainboard from a variation of the Sapphire Pure Performance, to an MSI K8N Neo4-FI. However, I quickly began to have serious instability problems, unexplained reboots, sometimes in a loop, momentary freezes, application crashes, screen blackouts and so on, the various problems could be triggered by playing a game, attempting to copy a large volume of files, or, with the wrong settings, just about anything really.

I quickly concluded that the RAM was to blame (my RAM has given me trouble with a new board before), so I set about tweaking it, changing voltage, timings etc.

To make a long story short, after several days of RAM tweaking (more conservative timings) I managed to bring the system under some degree of control, but games still give me some trouble, some of which I can predict, some of which I can't, and I'm getting an unusually high instance of Access Violations in software that is normally quite stable, SimCity 4, IE, McAfee etc. McAfee sometimes gets them on startup, SC4 crashes after 20 min of play, and IE and other programs can crash with this error at any time.

Needless to say I'm not happy and have just ordered 512MB guaranteed-compatible memory from Shop4Memory for testing.

Questions.

Have any of you guys seen stuff like this before? Did I make a mistake ordering new RAM? What could be the cause of all this stuff?

L31mr0d

SeanW wrote:

I quickly concluded that the RAM was to blame (my RAM has given me trouble with a new board before), so I set about tweaking it, changing voltage, timings etc.

How did you "quickly" come to this conclusion? Did you do any testing of the RAM? Like with memtest86? Have you looked up forums which deal with problems pertinent to your particular mobo?

savemejebus

possibly a silly question, but you did do a fresh install after changing mainboards right?

gline

savemejebus wrote:

possibly a silly question, but you did do a fresh install after changing mainboards right?

thats also what i was thinking,

also it might not be a problem ONLY with the ram, what about psu?? did you try a different one??

did you do a repair install of windows or delete partition and then format and do a clean install?

SeanW

Did a clean install after I started noticing problems, ran memtest 86 for 4.5 hours, no errors, but there was a very clear cause-and-effect between the problems I had/have, and changes to RAM settings in BIOS. It sure is confusing. PSU etc is OK as far as I know, it's a Seasonic and I'm not overloading it so it's not really likely.

L31mr0d

SeanW wrote:

there was a very clear cause-and-effect between the problems I had/have, and changes to RAM settings in BIOS.

elaborate!

SeanW

Ok, to answer the last question, I spent the last 4+ days tweaking RAM settings each change making some things more or less stable, 2 nights ago I threw out all my changes by loading Optimized Defaults in BIOS and made only minimal new ones - just setting CAS 3 and nothing else - seemed to make the system dramatically more stable but not stable enough.

So deicded to test my DIMMs indivdually, and the results so far seem encouraging.

I pulled the second DIMM from the second coloured channel after which the system became totally unstable and started falling apart even just by me scrolling through a list of files or a webpage.

So I pulled the first DIMM and replaced it with the second one - this just an hour ago, in the first channel, and now things seem to have totally stabilised. I've started testing my FPS games, starting with Deus Ex, it runs without problems, I tested SimCity 4, loaded my largest city, played it for almost an hour making a point of pushing the system as hard as possible, it ran without error and I closed it normally.

So far I have also not had any more reboots or Access Violations.

It may be a little premature to do the wardance of celebration that I'm planning but it looks like all my troubles were caused by a faulty 1st DIMM.

Final question: assuming that no more nasty surprises pop out at me between now and the time I recieve the 512MB stick from shop4memory, what's the best way for me to make use of it? Should I put it in the same coloured channel as my remaining OCZ DIMM or put in into first slot of the second channel which is where I had the old one.

Anti

Since its not the same ram, dont run it in dual chanel mode, Run it in single chanel.