Is this a memory(possibly dual channel specific) problem

[Haggisman]

Hi, I just finished building my new PC yesterday, and all day today I've been having memory(i think) problems. The machine was running 2x512mb crucial DDR3200 for a couple of days before, and no problems, but yesterday I put in a corsair value select dual channel kit (2gb) and i've had the following errors.

While playing world of warcraft I had a bluescreen with "page fault in non paged area" and the filename "ntoskrnl.exe" and the sound that was playing just before the crash started looping.

Again while playing WoW my sound turned to static and my PC rebooted

And again while playing WoW I had the same bluescreen error as above, but with a different filename, sounded like a driver or something ("ati32***.dll") and the sound went static.

After this, i reseated the memory chips, and I haven't bluescreened since, although WoW has crashed several times with a "The memory could not be "read"" error

I took the mem chip in slot 2 out, and tried again, and it played fine for about 3 hours(it didn't crash at all). I then swapped the chips out, and put the 2nd chip in slot 1, and again, it's been fine so far for a couple of hours.

I was going to now put the chips in slots 1 + 3(my motherboard has dual channel on 1 + 2 and 3 + 4), but i thought i would check first in case I'm looking in completely the wrong direction, although it would seem to be pointing to a problem related to memory

Edit: I ran memtest86 for 4 hours with both sticks in, and it found no errors.

Edit: forgot to add in - I managed to have a piece of spyware which i transferred from my old PC(me = noob) - spywarestrike. I didn't think this could cause these kinds of problems, but thought i would mention it just in case.

My spec is:

Sapphire Pure Crossfire Advantage Mobo
Powercolor x1800XT 512MB xfire edition (i'm working on the 2nd one =-P)
athlon64x2 4200+
2gb corsair value select ddr 3200 dual channel kit
SB Audigy ZS Platinum
Ultra X-connect modular PSU(500w)
4x Western Digital Caviar 120gb Sata

Thanks for any help - Nat

 

[Jimbo Mahoney]

Hmm.

Well I have heard of problems with some motherboards and Corsair, but I don't know if that is only for DFI motherboards.

Also, in my shuttle PC, I was having the same sort of crashes and BSODs (daily) that you describe. It would pass memtest86 ALL NIGHT (47 passes or something!) but just was not stable. Taking one of the sticks out solved the problem, so it was a dual channel problem (I tested both sticks and they were fine).

It could also be your memory timings because going to 2GB you're almost certainly going to have to use slightly slacker timings.

Along the same lines, but if you are overclocking your CPU, many people (myself included) find increasing the RAM amount reduces your overclock because of the additional strain on the memory controller, which is on-die in the AMD64. Slackening the timings / increasing the divider (slowing the memory down) can help and really doesn't hurt performance.

 

[Haggisman]

well, i haven't overclocked it (yet), so that shouldn't be affecting it, how do i go about slackening the timings? I'm guessing it's in the BIOS - also I mentioned it to the system engineer at my work - he thinks it is probably OS related? (win2k with sp4)