Second kit of F3-12800CL9D-4GBNQ on my Gigabyte P55A-UD3R causes Bluescreens

[ZenMaster]

Hello,

back in 2010, I built a new PC with the following hardware and specs:

Mainboard: Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3R Rev. 1.0, BIOS Version F5
RAM: G.Skill F3-12800CL9D-4GBNQ, all set to AUTO in BIOS
DRAM-Voltage at 1.58V
QPI/Vtt at 1.1V
9-9-9-24
I chose this model as it was on the "compatibility list" of the mainboard.
CPU: Core i5 750 at stock settings
PSU: Enermax 500W
Graphics Card: Zotac GF GTX470
OS: Windows 7 Home 64 bit

The Core i5 runs at 1333MHz RAM speed, but I was planning to OC a little back when I bought the hardware (the RAM can handle 1600). Due to lack of time I never OC?ed this PC. It is all running on default settings.

This system was actually rock stable, and never crashed a single time. The problems came when I plugged in a second kit of the exact same G.Skill RAM mentioned above (to make it 8 GB total, bought in the beginning of february 2011).
The PC boots into Windows without problems, but sometimes the OS bluescreens with the following STOP-CODE:

**STOP 0x0000007F (0x00000008, 0x00000000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000) UNEXPECTED_KERNEL_MODE_TRAP

The code 0x00000008 means someting like "double fault", and can be caused by various things, RAM being on the list as well.
I cannot reproduce this bluescreen at will, as the pc was running one day without any problems, but crashed the day after that.

I did some testing with MemTest v4, but the prog did not find any errors (6 hours testing in total).
Even did some testing with Prime95, assigning almost all my RAM to this software.... no problems. Some minutes after exiting Prime95, the PC bluescreened again.
Plugging in the 2 new RAM sticks even seemed to affect the speed of my PC, as all actions I did under Windows7 seemed to take longer than compared to before. Please note that I did not do any extensive measurement to back up this observation with numbers.

I ended up taking out the 2 new RAM sticks and the bluescreens did not ocurr again (which does not mean the BSOD can come back in the near future). The system even speeded up again to the state I was used to.

My questions:
1) Do you think the new RAM sticks are defective?
2) I was thinking those sticks would work "out-of-the-box" without any manual tweaking. Am I wrong?
3) How can I get those sticks to work or am I better off RMAing them to get a different set (I just wanted to plug them in and start working, without any extensive messing around in the BIOS, but will do so for a while)?

I am kindly asking for you assistance. Please dont hesitate asking for more details. I will provide any information I have.

Thank you for your help.

ZM

[Tradesman]

QPI/VTT will have to up a bit, could you post your BIOS settings? Thing is going from 2-4 sticks puts more strain on the BUS, MC and elsewhere so it takes some minor adjustments. Also which may not help is not all mix of sets will play well together, even when they are the same model, which is why diffferent size sets in total dram and number of sticks are offered, those sets are all tested to work together.

[ZenMaster]

QPI/VTT will have to up a bit, could you post your BIOS settings? Thing is going from 2-4 sticks puts more strain on the BUS, MC and elsewhere so it takes some minor adjustments.

To start off, I thank you for this hint. But I wonder why the BIOS does not automatically adjust the Voltage accordingly, as all is set to "AUTO".

Also which may not help is not all mix of sets will play well together, even when they are the same model, which is why diffferent size sets in total dram and number of sticks are offered, those sets are all tested to work together.

[Please note, no offense intened at anyone in the following section, even though it might look like a rant]
I understand what you are saying, but I have to say, this is not how it should be. To upgrade my RAM this basically means, I have the option of buying one additional kit of 2x2GB with the chance of failure (causing a lot of headache, lost time and maybe wasted money, making the upgrade of RAM a gamble), OR I throw out the already present 2x2GB kit and buy one new 4x2GB (or 2x4GB) kit (which again means a loss of money).

Maybe you understand that my interest is to have those 2 new sticks working in my machine. Upgrading RAM should be a simple process in my opinion, without tweaking or anything. But that is just my opinion and not really the subject of this thread.
[END of rant section]

Considering the fact you mentioned, I now have three things to consider for troubleshooting:

1. the RAM sticks may be broken
2. the RAM sticks may need more voltage on some settings
3. the new kit maybe wont work together with the old kit (which will render anything I do useless in the end)

Especially the last point doesnt make troubleshooting easier. :/


A question concerning the above mentioned Bluescreen (I would like to have more information):
as I have read on this forum G.Skill is testing its RAM extensively with all mainboard brands, can someone from G.SKill maybe tell me if you have data on this STOP-Code in your internal database? For example, did you get this STOP-Code at all? Does this code refer to broken sticks or what causes this error?

Thank you.

ZM

P.S.: Some input by GSKILL_TECH would be highly appreciated.

[GSKILL TECH]

Try the new kit by itself to see if it may be a compatibility issue between the kits. With dual and triple channel motherboards, the modules must be perfectly matching. This is why we must have full kits, otherwise we could simply sell individual modules.

In response to your rant, these types of adjustments are necesary for "performance" memory. The DDR3 standard is DDR3-1333 CL9, so if you want easy plug and play memory, any memory under that will work flawlessly without any adjustments. The issue is, no one wants standard memory anymore! =) Then the problem of not everyone knows how to manually adjust memory settings becomes an issue. DDR3-1600 is not too big of a problem, but there are people that think DDR3-2200 is a simple plug and play. This is surely not the case as "overclocking" techniques are typically required to stabilize this high of memory frequency. Of course most are unaware, so here I am having to explain and teach the best I can.

If the new kit works fine by itself, I would suggest sending them in for RMA, request to have them tested, then we will send you 4 modules that can work together.

http://www.gskill.com/rma.php

Thank you
GSKILL TECH

[ZenMaster]

Thank you Mr GSKILL TECH for your answer. Maybe I can have your opinion on the next points?

I think I now have enough info for further troubleshooting:

1. At first, I will plug in the 2 new modules and see if they are working OK now with the already present KIT. If yes, then the Bluescreen was caused by a broken Win7 Installation. If not, I will go to 2.
2. Here, I will increase the Voltage of the memory to 1.6 and increase QPI/Vtt to 1.2. I guess with those settings I will be well within the safe range. Then some extensive testing will tell if more Bluescreens ocurr. If yes, 3. kicks in.
3. I will take back the voltage adjustments and then take out the "old" kit and use the new kit exclusively in the ram banks of the old kit. This will tell me if the new kit is faulty or not, as I know my PC is rock stable with 2 sticks (the old ones) in those slots. Again, if it is all ok, then the sticks dont synch well together, which will directly lead to 4.
4. RMA :/ I thoroughly hope my issues will be solved before reaching this point, as sending in all 4 sticks at once will make my PC useless for an unknown time.

So again, thank you for the assistance so far, but I still would like to ask again, if you could answer my question concerning the Bluescreen 0x0000007F (see my post before this one below "rant section")?

Regards,

ZM

[GSKILL TECH]

I would suggest completing #3 first. If you find the new kit does not work by itself, then there is no reaosn to test them together. When you test them together, it just hides the problem even more.

The Stop Code is just hardware failure or incompatibility. But this can happen with bad settings, a bad module, and such reasons, which is why blue screens only tell us the obivous.. (something is wrong)

Thank you
GSKILL TECH

[ZenMaster]

OK, I have now replaced the "old" kit with the new kit (started with #3 in the above list as you suggested), and my PC is currently running with the new kit exclusively; so far without any problems.

Do you recommend running stress tests, or maybe MemTest? Or should I just use the machine for my normal work and see after a week what happened?

Please keep in mind, the bluescreen I was talking about cant be reproduced reliably by me; sometimes the PC ran stable for a whole day.

[GSKILL TECH]

Well, a program like Prime95 would stress it immediately, so any possible issues will arise quickly.

Thank you
GSKILL TECH

[ZenMaster]

To give you more information:

The following pictures are my DEFAULT BIOS settings for the new kit exclusively:









Then I did a run with MemTest86+ V4.2, which passed without problems:



For more informations about voltage settings, here some pics of CPU-Z and EasyTune. Please note I just installed EasyTune to read out voltages; I did NOT do any kind of OCing.








I even did some testing with Prime95, giving the software as much RAM as possible for its calculations. It passed without any errors or crashes.
I admit the testing is not exhaustive, but I did all I could in the time I had yesterday.
Do I need to do more testing?

[ZenMaster]

To complete the information I have so far, here are the BIOS screenshots of the old kit:









If you compare the screenshots one by one, you can see the contents is the same.

So both kits seem to work flawlessly, when used alone.

[ZenMaster]

Update:

So here is a small update what I did lately:

At first, I updated my Mainboard BIOS from F5 to F13. No problems so far.

Then I plugged in the second kit of ram sticks, and here are now my (default) BIOS settings:















I did not attach a new screenshot of voltages, as they are the same as in the picture above.

The only real difference I noticed is in the "roundtrip latency" (5th and 6th picture).