Solving hard crashes with BIOS adjustments

[wirelessF]

I'm still rocking my gaming rig that I built in 08/09 with an Intel DP43TF "system builders" mobo, Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600, 2x2 GB "stock" DDR2 RAM and now a nvidia 750ti (original build was a ati 4850.) Just to keep up with today's games (at 2560x1080 a sweet upgrade over 1440x900) I upgraded the video card and added 2x2 GB RAM totalling 8GB RAM. A couple weeks went fine until random soft and hard crashes would occur. Video card drivers would crash when browsing in Google Chrome, some games would throw file corrupt messages or hard crash all together needing a hard reboot. I RMA'd the memory first and it would still occur. Then I RMA's the video card even it showed no artifacting but a lot of the crashing was stemming from the video card drivers. Nope still crashing.

So now the issue points back to the RAM. Removing the new RAM the system was stable so I lived with it. But I came back to the issue and was reading up on RAM JEDEC specs on how most stock RAM are built to spec (DDR2 6-6-6-18 1.8V). Some "gaming" RAM are speced differently and may require going into BIOS to adjust the timings correctly. Went into BIOS and mobo correctly identifies RAM JEDEC timings and voltage. Set it to manual mode, left the stock timings but instead upped the voltage by a notch (1.92V) and gave it a shot. Wow, no crashes, games run much more stable, chrome not crashing. It's just one of those obscure fixes I guess.

tl:dr Bumping RAM voltage solved memory based crashing.

 

[901Memphis]

Do you know the stock speed and timings the memory is rated for?

 

[Colt45ws]

Yes, Ive seen this on the older boards where the RAM specs out a specific voltage the board will pick up the tighter timing of the performance RAM but not the voltage. I always speced everything manually rather than relying on the BIOS auto-configure.
Getting a hold of a boot cd like Ultimate Boot CD is very helpful in solving these problems as you would have seen the issue as soon as you started Memtest86.

 

[BigD1]

Over at Tom's Hardware in the System Builder Marathon, the builder said he could Prime for hours, and get no errors, but playing video games would get errors. Memory voltage had to be increased to make it stable. This was an overclocked rig, and the point was to compare the performance to to a core i3 rig that was built earlier.

 

[901Memphis]

Originally Posted By: Colt45ws
Yes, Ive seen this on the older boards where the RAM specs out a specific voltage the board will pick up the tighter timing of the performance RAM but not the voltage. I always speced everything manually rather than relying on the BIOS auto-configure.
Getting a hold of a boot cd like Ultimate Boot CD is very helpful in solving these problems as you would have seen the issue as soon as you started Memtest86.


Yes because if you don't know what settings to change in prime the test is useless for ram stability.

 

[Colt45ws]

Originally Posted By: 901Memphis
Originally Posted By: Colt45ws
Yes, Ive seen this on the older boards where the RAM specs out a specific voltage the board will pick up the tighter timing of the performance RAM but not the voltage. I always speced everything manually rather than relying on the BIOS auto-configure.
Getting a hold of a boot cd like Ultimate Boot CD is very helpful in solving these problems as you would have seen the issue as soon as you started Memtest86.


Yes because if you don't know what settings to change in prime the test is useless for ram stability.

Yes. Thats why I run both when Im testing. At least 24-48 hours each. Then I run a Maximum burn IntelBurnTest for like 10 iterations.

 

[Rand]

4 sticks of ram can sometimes need a voltage bump to be stable has to do with 2 sticks per channel. vs 1