Hi guys,
I've been using a couple of existing threads on here to try and solve my problems, but sadly to no avail, so here I am making my own post to hopefully get to the bottom of this.
I've done a reasonable amount of OCing in the past, so i'm fairly savvy with what needs changing etc, but this is infuriating me now,
I recently got hold of 12gb of mushkin ram for cheap at work. I ran a memtest on all 6 sticks (not individually) for 24 hours before buying and there were no errors at all.
12gb of Mushkin RAM (product code 998946) PC3-12800 9-9-9-24.
It's 6 sticks of 2GB (2 sets of matching 3).
Prior to this RAM, I had 6gb of Corsair XMS3 and it was as stable as a rock, even with a hefty overclock to 4.1 on my Xeon X5650 (Beast of a cpu, best £40 upgrade ever).
Now, however, i CANNOT get this 12gb mushkin stable. Sometimes it doesn't post properly and resets CMOS to default before continuing, sometimes it gets to windows 8.1 loading and blue screens (memory_management usually), then the next time that incredibly annoying windows repair menu launches (and is useless as none of it seems to work), sometimes even that menu crashes and resets...but here's the thing, sometimes it will just WORK!
These varying occurences can happen without changing any settings in between at all. Once windows boots up it's solid. No slowdowns, all 12gb recognised by windows and CPU-Z. Gaming for hours, Movie watching for hours, installing and uninstalling, virus scanning, and using PLEX to stream. It was most recently on and solid for 3 days non-stop. Reset it when I got back home to it, and now it's buggered again...NO SETTING CHANGED.
The first thing I did was remove my CPU OC, as the timings were all pretty high and specific to my previous set of RAM. Optimized defaults tried...crashed at windows load, fail-safe defaults....same, crashed on windows boot
I then upped my DRAM voltage to 1.66 as per a lot of recommendations, then upped my CPI/VVT to manage the extra ram, and this seems to have a sweet-spot around 1.4 (where I most recently had it stable). I've tried with XMP on, and XMP off. I've tried with Turbo,standard and extreme. I've gone through so many variations of settings that SHOULD work, but nothing seems stable.
I'm not certain that it isn't a hardware issue, but the fact that when it DOES boot, it performs flawlessly and is stable for days makes me think the RAM is fine, it's just some settings that aren't managing to load windows comfortably.
It's so tricky to pinpoint the issue for me, as there seems to be no patterns to break down. The blue screen 75% of the time seems to be when the windows desktop should appear once loaded. I've already had to system restore once because this crash (At that vital time during windows loading) screwed with my registry/drivers and gave me this freaky flickering desktop causing recurring hardware issue.
I'm hoping someone here could shine some light on what 'DOES WORK' ie, don't touch it, it won't cause these issues, what i should be changing, or maybe you can spot something between my hardware that just outright isn't compatible?
Thanks SO MUCH in advance for your extra knowledge, I've already learn't a lot from lurking here!
Maybe i'm not destined to use 12gb ram via 6 sticks. Sigh </3
I've been using a couple of existing threads on here to try and solve my problems, but sadly to no avail, so here I am making my own post to hopefully get to the bottom of this.
I've done a reasonable amount of OCing in the past, so i'm fairly savvy with what needs changing etc, but this is infuriating me now,
I recently got hold of 12gb of mushkin ram for cheap at work. I ran a memtest on all 6 sticks (not individually) for 24 hours before buying and there were no errors at all.
12gb of Mushkin RAM (product code 998946) PC3-12800 9-9-9-24.
It's 6 sticks of 2GB (2 sets of matching 3).
Prior to this RAM, I had 6gb of Corsair XMS3 and it was as stable as a rock, even with a hefty overclock to 4.1 on my Xeon X5650 (Beast of a cpu, best £40 upgrade ever).
Now, however, i CANNOT get this 12gb mushkin stable. Sometimes it doesn't post properly and resets CMOS to default before continuing, sometimes it gets to windows 8.1 loading and blue screens (memory_management usually), then the next time that incredibly annoying windows repair menu launches (and is useless as none of it seems to work), sometimes even that menu crashes and resets...but here's the thing, sometimes it will just WORK!
These varying occurences can happen without changing any settings in between at all. Once windows boots up it's solid. No slowdowns, all 12gb recognised by windows and CPU-Z. Gaming for hours, Movie watching for hours, installing and uninstalling, virus scanning, and using PLEX to stream. It was most recently on and solid for 3 days non-stop. Reset it when I got back home to it, and now it's buggered again...NO SETTING CHANGED.
The first thing I did was remove my CPU OC, as the timings were all pretty high and specific to my previous set of RAM. Optimized defaults tried...crashed at windows load, fail-safe defaults....same, crashed on windows boot
I then upped my DRAM voltage to 1.66 as per a lot of recommendations, then upped my CPI/VVT to manage the extra ram, and this seems to have a sweet-spot around 1.4 (where I most recently had it stable). I've tried with XMP on, and XMP off. I've tried with Turbo,standard and extreme. I've gone through so many variations of settings that SHOULD work, but nothing seems stable.
I'm not certain that it isn't a hardware issue, but the fact that when it DOES boot, it performs flawlessly and is stable for days makes me think the RAM is fine, it's just some settings that aren't managing to load windows comfortably.
It's so tricky to pinpoint the issue for me, as there seems to be no patterns to break down. The blue screen 75% of the time seems to be when the windows desktop should appear once loaded. I've already had to system restore once because this crash (At that vital time during windows loading) screwed with my registry/drivers and gave me this freaky flickering desktop causing recurring hardware issue.
I'm hoping someone here could shine some light on what 'DOES WORK' ie, don't touch it, it won't cause these issues, what i should be changing, or maybe you can spot something between my hardware that just outright isn't compatible?
Thanks SO MUCH in advance for your extra knowledge, I've already learn't a lot from lurking here!
Maybe i'm not destined to use 12gb ram via 6 sticks. Sigh </3
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