Memtest failure

A

asmielia

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 10, 2003
Messages
337
Hi,
my company has been having all sorts of issues with RAM that came in our Dell desktops. All 5 desktops are identical and were bought at the same time about 3 years ago. It seems like they've each taken turns having the RAM fail. I've been trying to sort out the good sticks from the bad and I'm kind of confused by the results.

I tested 10 identical sticks of 512mb:
-8 sticks passed 1 pass of memtest86
-2 sticks failed

I then took the 8 good sticks, put 4 in at once, and ran 3 passes of memtest86, it passed. I then took the other 4 good sticks and it failed pretty quickly. I took 2 of those out, and it failed again fairly soon with the remaining 2. So of those 2, I tested each individually, 4 passes each no failure?!

So I'm confused. The memory controller can obviously handle 4 sticks at once in dual channel, since it passed with 4 of the sticks. So are some of the sticks damaged but the damage is only visible when it runs in dual channel?
 
Do all of the sticks have the same chips? If they are covered can you spot any differences between them at all? If you test an individual stick and it passes but fails when grouped with other sticks then its got to be a configuration problem or a buggy bios setting the wrong speeds/voltages.
 
They're virtually identical, but not identical.

They're all Samsung, some are:
1Rx8 PC2-4200U-444-12-D3
some are:
1Rx8 PC2-4200U-444-12-D1

The timings are the same, although I just noticed that the CAS settings within memtest are 4-4-4-11, not 4-4-4-12 as seems to be indicated by the label. Maybe that's the problem.

I just tested 2 sticks that passed alone in single channel, but failed together in single channel. Once my current test is done, I'll check again to make sure the CAS settings are detected as the same whether I'm running them individually or together.

Thanks
 
this happened to me as well in my build, 2 sticks together would fail but if tested individually they would pass, i think it might have something to do with voltage on the sticks and NB, try tweaking them up a little. (not sure if you can do that with the dell BIOS)
 
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