A few days ago my PC started bluescreening or freezing in Windows 10. Since I literally changed nothing (also I can't rule out some automatic driver updates I have missed) I suspected a hardware fault. I confirmed that by reinstalling Windows and the freezes stayed.
Hardware info:
- 2x4GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3 (1333MHz)
- ASRock 870 Extreme 3 board
- AMD Phenom II X4 955
I ran a CPU stress test as well as memtest from a USB drive for a few hours and that caused no errors. I then booted up Ubuntu and used stress to put the system under a combined load and I found a pattern but I'm not sure how to interpret the results. If I fire up a lot of threads that would a allocate a high percentage of RAM the system will freeze.
I tried switching RAM banks, swapping banks and also running each of the sticks alone. I also tried lowering the frequency for the RAM and disable any non-auto configuration but it seems to not make a difference.
Since this effect also manifests when using each RAM stick on it's own I'm pretty sure there is something wrong with the board or (unlikely) the CPU. I may be the RAM itself but that would mean that two separate sticks stated borking at the same time which I find highly unlikely.
Question:
- Do you agree with my conclusion that it's probably not the RAM itself but instead something else?
- Are there any further steps I could do to narrow down the problem?
1 Answer
Stress is not the right tool to determine if there is a problem with your RAM. While stress is useful for testing heavy loads, it cannot give you much information as to where the problem truly is. Use a memory diagnostic tool like Memtest86+. This program will actually test the RAM for faults. Again, test them one stick at a time, as this will help determine if any individual stick is bad.
