[Ben]

Hello folks!

Does anybody have any favourite applications for diagnosing bad RAM? What I really need, in addition, is the ability to identify which stick of RAM is bad.

My Dell Precision 670 is, in theory, a very powerful machine. Unfortunately it's rarely used because it's so unstable. Amazingly it still has warranty, so I'd really like to get it sorted.

[Hands0n]

Hello folks!

Does anybody have any favourite applications for diagnosing bad RAM? What I really need, in addition, is the ability to identify which stick of RAM is bad.

My Dell Precision 670 is, in theory, a very powerful machine. Unfortunately it's rarely used because it's so unstable. Amazingly it still has warranty, so I'd really like to get it sorted.

I usually use a process of elimination to identify the faulty stick or pair. Actual ram testers are hardware based and expensive. I have found software ram testers ambiguous at best.

[hecatae]

memtest86, found on live cd linux distributions like pclinuxos

[Ben]

Cheers guys, I was hoping there was an easier way. Looks like many more hours of memtest86 then - unless I can get Dell to replace the whole lot... we'll see.

[Ben]

Ok, well, after what feels like endless testing I narrowed it down to two sticks of RAM. The machine has two 8x sticks and two 4x sticks, probably to most efficiently make use of the bandwidth available to all of the slots. Just using the two 8x sticks gave some errors, albeit on pass 9, and now running with just the 4x sticks everything seems much better. It could all be in my head, but we'll see!

Hopefully I'll be able to get Dell to replace the two 8x sticks and I'll take it from there...