Bad RAM or Bad slots?

[Tetsuiga]

Greetings, and thank you for taking the time to read my story.

About a month ago, i woke up, turned on my machine and could not boot into windows, i had noticed a day or two prior that windows was not reporting my 32g of ram correctly, remembering that i removed the 2nd pairing of DDR 4 from my machine and presto it booted fine, and reported the remaining 16 gb, Fine i thought i had a bad stock somewhere ill RMA it soon, whatever.

A few weeks into using the machine like that, i started crashing during gameplay, most notably during GTA 5 and PUBG, now, i realize PUBG is a mess and tends to crash for all sorts of reasons i mainly discounted it as an issue with those games and carried on. Then it started happening in all my games , even ones that were normally rock solid like Warhammer II.

I have since dropped to one stick of the initial 4, and seem to be stable, at least i havnt crashed during normal gameplay at any rate.

I downloaded who crashed, and it pointed to a ntsokrnl issue, which tends to be typically RAM or driver related, at least from all the searching ive done over the last few weeks. I have done the following steps trying to troubleshoot this,

Complete clean reinstall of windows 10
Uninstallation and reinstallation of all current drivers to their most recent availible version
Run memtest 86 allowing to pass twice, showed no errors
Run CHKDSK and windows memory test, Showed no issues.
Updated BIOS to its most recent version
Tried verifing games integrity on steam, and in some cases reinstalled them completely
Run prime 95 on blend for 2-4 hours cant rem exactly No issues with CPU that i can tell
Ran verifier and couldnt find any issues
Ran sfc /scannow and dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth


I am Unsure how to proceed at this point. I'm at a loss trying to figure out if its even really the RAM at this point. I'm starting to suspect maybe the motherboard slots are bad somehow. i have no other DDR 4 ram to even test that. Anyone have any ideas?


Windows 10 home
Ryzen 1800x
GTX 1080ti STRIX
Asus Crosshair VI
Samsung 850 evo {OS DRIVE}
WD 3 gb HDD {STORAGE DRIVE}
1 stick out of 4 {8GB} ddr4 3200 TridentzRGB


Thanks to any and everyone who took the time to even attempt to read or help.

 

[geofelt]

What might have changed since all was well?

Ryzen is picky about ram.

If all your ram is not from the same kit, that is a problem.
Ram from the same vendor and part number can be made up of differing manufacturing components over time.
Some motherboards, can be very sensitive to this.
This is more difficult when more sticks are involved.

2. Is your ram explicitly supported?
Is it on the motherboard ram QVL support list.
Go to g.skil and access their ram configurator.
is it on the list of supported kits for your motherboard?

If you can pass memtest86, it is unlikely to be ram that is causing your problem.

 

[Tetsuiga]

G.SKILL TridentZ RGB Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 3200 (PC4 25600) Desktop Memory Model F4-3200C16Q-32GTZR

Is the specific model or the memory, i will double check the qvl's

The only thing i can think of that has changed was windows forcing an update on me, and nvidia drivers,


Upon checking the QVL list this model is indeed not on there, but the only difference between the models i can see is the lighting on mine, the ram itself should be the sam as far as i know, which addmittedly i could be wrong, but the ram was fine for a year and a half of high usage, im not sure if compatibility is the issue

 

[geofelt]

I doubt ram is your issue but you might contact g.skil support.

More likely, it has to do with a windows update.
You should go directly to the nvidia web site and download the latest graphics driver directly.
You might try doing the same with the motherboard chipset drivers..
When you get it all going, I suggest you disable the windows capability of updating drivers.

 

[Tetsuiga]

I am currently going through the process of running games and such under each of the 4 sticks, with only one stick in at a time, will shoot asus and gskill and email and see what they think, im leaning towards bad DIMM slots atm

 

[geofelt]

I am currently going through the process of running games and such under each of the 4 sticks, with only one stick in at a time, will shoot asus and gskill and email and see what they think, im leaning towards bad DIMM slots atm

If the slots were bad, I would think memtest86 would discover it.

 

[Tetsuiga]

Its odd, but seemingly using one stick results in no errors, when i put the others in, i crash, within 5 minutes of gameplay, this one stick out of the bunch tho is a solid 30mins - hr , no crash as of yet, it seems odd that memtest didnt find it, maybe i didnt run it long enough for it to find it