Originally posted by: videopho
I had persistent BSOD (vista 64) quite a bit either during game or browsing in the net about two months ago.
I then ran Orthos test which gave me a lead. It failed after one round or two of mixed cpd/ram test.
This led me to run memtest86 which failed 2 sticks out of 4 (1gb each).
Pulled the 2 bad sticks out everything ran fine afterward.
The bad memory sticks were made by Crucial Tech (I'd never buy memory from them any more considering what happened after a year of less than frequent usage).
I'm not suggesting you may have the same issue but at least it's worth a try.
I'd been having TDR issues for quite some time and didn't realize what it was. At first I thought I was getting the video corruption issue I've read so much about but after a few bios updates the problem remained. Putting the system in SLI mode seemed to make the problem worse.
For some reason though I wasn't getting the actual message that the display driver had stopped and been restarted all the time.
Last week I installed Windows 7 RC 64-bit and of course the problem persisted. I'd tried everything. Rivatuner with fans on full, switching video cards, updating drivers, re-installing drivers etc. I'd get random TDRs and Crysis would crash on me if I was playing when it happened.
Then I read your post and the one after it and thought hmm it's a new system but let me test it anyway. It wasn't even 10 minutes before it told me I had errors. So I went through a series of tests to narrow it down. Then I went out and bought 4 gigs of Corsair memory. I should have gone with them from the start but I was building this system and that A-Data memory was at a nice affordable price. Heh never again.
With the new memory in all my TDR issues have gone away. I ran Crysis with High settings (Which causes it to use more memory) and played for hours. Gonna play some more in a bit here too.
Then just to make sure I ran Memtest and left it over night. No errors found ad it made at least 3 full passes of 6 gigs of memory.
So anyone who is experiencing TDRs run memtest. Run it for a while because during my testing I tested each stick individually and it actually ran though several times with no errors but as soon as one ran and got errors it was out. Definitely let it run for hours because a bad memory stick doesn't mean it's bad all the time just unreliable which is why pinning it down is so frustrating.