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Since I bought the new hardware I spoke about earlier I’ve had constant issues with the pc randomly rebooting, crashes within World of Warcraft (and that sucks when you have one instance out of five randomly crashing, especially if it’s the main), services and other parts of Vista halting or crashing and the reboots in one instance trashed my boot drive to force a reinstall. The only inidication of what it could be were the issues noticed and Prime95 having threads stop (almost instantly from starting with rounding turned on) due to hardware faults but with no help in diagnosing, but it at least helped me narrow things down to memory or the motherboard memory channels since the voltages for the psu were always fine and the cpu was fine as well.

Today I woke up a little later than I had hoped so decided rather than hopping into World of Warcraft I’d see if I could track it down. Started off by removing two sticks or ram and leaving two in channels 0,2 and testing in Prime95. Testing this way still showed a fault so I dropped down to one stick in channel 0 since I was still concerned that it could be the motherboard with issues, and that went fine so I put the other stick to the side and placed one of the other two sticks into channel 2. Testing in Prime95 with this set-up also went fine so I placed a third stick into the system in channel 1 and tested to again find no issues.

By now the system had been running stable under Prime95 with 3Gb for about an hour so I placed the fourth stick back into the system in channel 3, which it had never been in, and within 2 minutes of Prime95 running I had threads stopped due to hardware errors and about a minute later the machine rebooted itself….game, set, match, we have found the hardware fault so now it’s just a matter doing an RMA for the stick and get back up to full spec before I start trying to overclock, but at least now I shouldn’t have to worry about any crashes while playing.