memtest producing errors possibly bad cpu or ram?

[perithimus]

I was getting video artifacts on my intel integrated graphics which I was able to find one of my ram sticks as the culprit. I put the suspected bad stick in and artifacts would show up.If I used the good stick I could go 24 hours without artifacts.


So I replaced the ram. I ran the new ram in memtest over night and got a lot of errors.


After this run I tested one stick at a time and was able to get errors with one stick, but could go hours on memtest without errors on the other stick of ram. I then tested the good stick of ram in each slot and no errors. I took the bad stick of ram and tested it in different slots and I got errors in the first 2 slots. I then ran the bad stick in the last ram slot and got no errors in 4 hours. Seemed odd so I thought maybe the motherboard was bad as it's unlikely to have 2 sets of ram that were bad.

I replaced the motherboard, and ran memtest with the second set of ram I bought. I got errors within 5 minutes.


So I took the stick of ram that I knew was good from the second set and ran memtest over night. No errors. So I am guessing I did get 2 sets of bad ram? Or should I be looking at the cpu? Thanks guys.

Edit: I just noticed I was running am older version of memtest. I am now running version 5.01 and no errors with both sticks on the second set of ram so far at an hour and a half in. Is it possible running an older version of memtest could create false errors?

[David (PassMark)]

The errors are restricted to a fairly tight range of addresses. 9216MB - 9454MB. Nothing is impossible, but I think it is unlikely that it is the CPU.

You could try playing around with the RAM timings and voltages in BIOS with the bad stick and see if you can get it to come good. Maybe lower the clock speed slightly and increase the voltage very slightly.

The difference between V4 and V5 might be due to the ranges of memory available for testing. For example maybe the 9200MB range is reserved for video RAM when running in UEFI mode (and so not tested in V5). You can dump out the memory ranges used in V5 if you wanted to check this.

[perithimus]

I ran version 5.1.0 for almost 7 hours without errors. I did run prime95 to load the cpu and that ran all night. I must have spaced that. Is it better to run version 4 or 5? I'm good with the fact version 5 ran so long without issue.

Edit: I also did reseat the second stick prior to testing with version 5

Also here's the results of the version 5 test

[perithimus]

Just for the heck of it, I ran prime 95 again all night last night with no errors.