PC restarts before starting to test & Don't know what the problem is

[ecarnage]

Hello

So a few weeks back i upgraded my RAM to 12gb from 8, then it started get different blue screens such as;

kernel security check failure

clock watchdog timeout

system thread exception not handled

system service exception

cache manager




Tbh I am not a computer person and I have no idea what I am doing most the time



I googled and thought I must update my graphics card driver, I had this error 195 (I have AMD Radeon r9 200) “Amd Installer cannot continue because it is unable to access the required web resources” this made me even more confused together with those blue screen error codes listed above, (they all seem like driver related?) I did managed to update my graphics card driver successfully later, but then I started to get random restarts or freezes, more blue screens

Then I started to get suspicious of my ram (I think I am pretty late on that) I googled how to check a ram is bad and got here, I tried 2-3 other applications but they didn’t gave me any results or told me my rams are fine.



Then I tried Memtest86 but I couldn’t get past the “retrieving hardware info & data” screen, my computer is always restarting before getting to the config screen, this is my log file, I need help on this because I don’t know what I am looking at or what I am doing either.

[David (PassMark)]

From the log it seems like you are running a ASUS M5A97 motherboard with BIOS from 04/09/2014 and a AMD FX-8300 CPU with 4 RAM sticks (2 x 2GB and 2 x 4GB).

The log always stops on this line
2021-07-10 16:59:05 - MPSupportTestMPServices - AP dispatch test
2021-07-10 16:59:05 - MPSupportTestMPServices - Starting AP#1
<lockup after this line>
This bit of the code is testing the systems ability to do multi-threading in UEFI BIOS. So a failure at this point could be hardware related or it could be a bug in your old UEFI BIOS.

Unfornately UEFI bugs are fairly commonn. See,
https://forums.passmark.com/memtest8...election-modes

By chance ASUS confirmed a UEFI bug in this board in 2016.
https://forums.passmark.com/memtest8...2958#post32958
then fixed it internally, but might never had made it public (not sure on this point)
https://forums.passmark.com/memtest8...3169#post33169

But this known bug didn't display the exact fault that you saw, but still a BIOS update might help if one was available.

First obvious thing to test it removing the additional 4GB of RAM you added and see if the system becomes stable again.
Then try testing just the new 4GB of RAM by itself.

Then based on those results there might be other things to try.

[ecarnage]

Thanks, i had no idea BIOS update was a thing lol, i did update my bios later run my pc, there was no blue screens anymore but just one freeze, then i ran memtest86 again but instead of a restart it just froze, the stop line on the log seemed the same as before, so i take out one of my RAMs, no blue screen or freeze so far, computer seems fine right now

[David (PassMark)]

So either the new RAM is just BAD. Or the motherboard is incompatible with this combination of 2GB and 4GB sticks.
Generally people recommend matching all the sticks of RAM in a machine. Mixed sticks should work in theory but in practice the vendors never really test these cases very well. There are just too many permutations.