Gadgetory

welcome to an episode of Linus tech tips where I share my frustrations with you a little bit I have as some of you know I have what I call the Linus Edition Ram this is some older ocz memory that was custom done for me you can see there isn't even a part number on it or anything like that you've probably never seen a black and blue color scheme like this with an XT C heat spreader it was really really cool really special so I had 24 gigs of it that's six by four gigs and it's like the coolest thing ever I'm super proud of it and saw some more than whatever it's broken now so I was running into issues where the computer that was running it you can see I only have five of the sticks here one of the sticks is known good and it's in my wife's machine right now so she has four gigs of memory which I'd love to increase so that won't have to video edit on her machine it's got enough memory and all that good stuff so what happened was her machine started blue screening randomly and I was only using three of the sticks in her machine at the time and so I pulled out memory I swapped memory until I found one that wasn't causing problems anymore and now I am left with the challenge of finding you know it's like out of five sticks now I have to find not only the one that I know is dead so this is the one that seemed to be causing the problems with her machine so what I did was I confirmed this one was dead by using prime95 blend and I'll show you guys the settings I'm using later this is why I hate overclocking memory because memory issues are so hard to diagnose and so hard to narrow down to what's working or what's not or what's causing the issue unless you're the rest of your system is a hundred percent completely rock-solid I wouldn't even begin to touch memory because it's much much more finicky so that one that one's dead because what happened was I took four sticks and I ran them in quad channel on this motherboard I set it to the settings I know the memory works at so 1600 C 9 1.65 volts default timings other than that one T command rate and I got errors after about eight hours so I did every stick one by one all five of these sticks in dim slot one ran them individually at the same settings remember guys it's less stressful for the memory to run in individual mode than it is in a multi-channel mode so this is the only one that actually failed it failed after about 10 hours of prime95 blend which is very frustrating because it makes the whole process take a long time so then I went oh yeah okay great everything must be good now so all I have to do now is take the four remaining sticks and run them in quad-channel and it'll pass so after about 10 hours it failed which means that at least one of the sticks in here is still bad even though it was able to run on its own it can't run in a multi-channel configuration so since then I have taken this one out and I tried to run these three and it failed then I took this one out and I put this one back in and tried to run these ones in triple-channel and as you guys can see like that peoples ask me all the time how long should I run my configuration in prime or some other stress test before I know it's stable and I come back to them I say 24 hours or 48 hours like oh I read it for 3 hours and it didn't do fail so it must be must be ok then right no no no it isn't because you see here torture tests can encounter an error 7 hours and 54 minutes in no problem so the settings that I'm using here so if your system makes a mathematical error it is not stable now that error could cause any number of things to happen it could cause a game to crash it could cause a program to kind of lock up for a second it could cause your entire operating system to corrupt you don't know what an error will do until you have an error and it does something so that's why I do not tolerate any errors in my machines and people who are like yeah i overclock my cpu to whatever and pretty stable it's game stable no no game stable is not stable stable is stable so to show you guys the settings i'm using i'm using the blend preset and then I'm going custom and then I'm adjusting the memory to use to something near to what so I'd go with something like that I'd go I'm you know C's 11 and a half gigabytes if we're going to have 12 gigs of memory in there so what I'm going to do now that I know I'm hoping it's only one more stick that's dead because they used to run in these settings just fine so this one remember I know this one's dead this one's going on the wall with the other legendary stuff so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to shut the system down like it takes days to diagnose a dead memory stick especially with these multi-channel configurations we have now where you can have up to eight sticks of memory in a desktop machine it means ridiculous so now I've tested this this and this and I've tested this this and this and I'm still getting errors so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to put this guy back in and I'm going to take out one of these guys and we're going to see how that how that goes for us it's always important when you're testing this kind of stuff like if I put them in all the wrong slots then they might all be running in single-channel mode so you want to populate the the DIMM slots in the right order so there's there you go see they're all they're all labeled there so I need to make sure I'm populating a1 b1 and yeah there we go and c1 in order to get this working so the system shut down just going to go ahead and grab myself on the power supply here turn the power supply off just because you never know when a system is going to you know go ahead and just turn itself on when you're in the middle of working on it because it happens let me tell you that was a scary one I just like I plugged in a I plugged in a PCI Express card in the system powered on before I'd even finished getting it into the slot I was like oh yay dead card dead board they didn't die they were okay actually okay so there you go so now I'm going to see if maybe my stick B is dead it's important to label stuff I mean I can I can remember but either you know especially when all the memory looks the same it's important to make sure you actually do label things so anyway there we go so then we're going to power back up and it's going to need in other hoops I need to turn my power supply back on sorry power it back up and hopefully it doesn't take another eight hours to find the error again but I've already been working on this for days and it's been very frustrating so there you go guys how to diagnose memory problems takes a while mem test 86 is another one but it used to be I mean just like prime it used to be a lot faster back when it didn't have to go through you know twelve sixteen twenty-four forty-eight gigs of memory in order to find out if there was any kind of problem and yeah yeah don't forget to subscribe - tech tips from unboxings reviews and other computer videos and I hope this has been helpful remember guys if you're having a stability issue with your system the things to check memory make sure your memory is a hundred percent stable power supply if memory isn't the problem it's probably your power supply and then you move on to your motherboard and then you move on to it's probably a software issue unless you're you know your video card driver is crashing or something very specific and you can go okay yeah that's probably the video card thanks guys take care