- Dec 30, 2009
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It's been really tough for me to say, and I've had annoyingly "wierd" things happen with no rhyme or reason. First of all, I recently replaced my dying P2 940 with an 830, as I talked about here: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2202875&highlight= Then, in my haste to get up and running again, I didn't wipe the win7 install or anything. it booted up and ran fine at 3.5ghz. It passed a 6 hour OCCT run (medium data set) just fine.
2 Days later win7 wouldn't boot, it would hang every time. OK, I'll go back to stock speeds, reinstall windows, and move up carefully. Maybe I pushed the OC too hard, or maybe the dying 940 left a ticking timebomb of a flipped bit in the OS. Everything goes just fine, and it passes every test I throw at it along the way, and next thing I know, I'm back at 3.5ghz. Now, I figure it might be the memory subsystem. The RAM itself is fine at 1066, but the other 2 CPUs I had on the board wouldn't go much past a base clock of 240, and even with the 830, the board won't POST at 260. (it's at 250 and DDR2 1000 with timings that are known good at 1066) So I decide to run Memtest 86+. Mid way thru the 2nd pass it just hangs, no errors or anything, and the + sign and cursor keep blinking, but the clock stops counting and it stops running tests. I reset memtest, and run it overnight in it's 'safe mode'(supposed to give greater stability to the program), and it completes 10 passes without problem.
I set it to run OCCT while I'm at work today, (large data set to test memory too) and 9 hours in it looks like it failed with "out of memory" and "Generic Error in GDI+" errors, both of which it wanted to report to the Dev team. At the same time windows reports that it authenticated itself this afternoon, which makes me think that it was a resource conflict between the two programs that caused the crash.
Am I being a hopeless optimist and ignoring instability when it shows up, or am I just seeing a lot of random flukes all at once because I'm looking for them?
2 Days later win7 wouldn't boot, it would hang every time. OK, I'll go back to stock speeds, reinstall windows, and move up carefully. Maybe I pushed the OC too hard, or maybe the dying 940 left a ticking timebomb of a flipped bit in the OS. Everything goes just fine, and it passes every test I throw at it along the way, and next thing I know, I'm back at 3.5ghz. Now, I figure it might be the memory subsystem. The RAM itself is fine at 1066, but the other 2 CPUs I had on the board wouldn't go much past a base clock of 240, and even with the 830, the board won't POST at 260. (it's at 250 and DDR2 1000 with timings that are known good at 1066) So I decide to run Memtest 86+. Mid way thru the 2nd pass it just hangs, no errors or anything, and the + sign and cursor keep blinking, but the clock stops counting and it stops running tests. I reset memtest, and run it overnight in it's 'safe mode'(supposed to give greater stability to the program), and it completes 10 passes without problem.
I set it to run OCCT while I'm at work today, (large data set to test memory too) and 9 hours in it looks like it failed with "out of memory" and "Generic Error in GDI+" errors, both of which it wanted to report to the Dev team. At the same time windows reports that it authenticated itself this afternoon, which makes me think that it was a resource conflict between the two programs that caused the crash.
Am I being a hopeless optimist and ignoring instability when it shows up, or am I just seeing a lot of random flukes all at once because I'm looking for them?