Blue screen after installing more RAM

[tylerjlapierre]

I bought the components of my PC over a year ago and has worked with one stick of ram with no issues but I wanted more ram to boost its performance. After installing the second stick of ram today it has been blue screening constantly. It seems to be okay when I browse the internet or at least last longer without crashing but when I try to play a game it'll crash within a few minutes. I did read a few forums that suggested adjusting voltage and timings but I'm not sure if I did it correctly, I'm not the most knowledgeable about these things.

Motherboard: ASRock AB350M-HDV AM4 AMD Promontory B350 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.1 HDMI Micro ATX

Ram: 2x G.SKILL Aegis 8GB 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 3000 (PC4 24000) Intel Z170 Platform Memory (Desktop Memory) Model F4-3000C16S-8GISB

 

[Darkbreeze]

What are your FULL system specs.

CPU?
Power supply model?

Is the CPU overclocked?

Are you running the memory at the XMP profile? Don't mess with voltage and timings until you done that.


Bottom line though is, when you don't buy sticks of memory together in a matched set, it's ALWAYS a crapshoot as to whether they are going to run together in dual channel, or even play nice together at all. Matched sets are tested at the factory and guaranteed to be compatible.

When you buy the same model number, but separately, there is no guarantee they will run together correctly or even have the same IC's (Memory chips), ranks, timings or other characteristics. Even if they do have all the same onboard components, if they came from different production runs it's always hit or miss trying to get unmatched sticks to play nice.

As you can see at this link, I've shown where there are three wildly different memory modules, all using very different configurations, and not at all likely to run together in dual channel or perhaps at all.

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-3610013/amd-ram-compatibility.html#20562100

 

[tylerjlapierre]

Hi, thanks for the response.

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 1600 Six-Core Processor 3.20GHz

PSU: CORSAIR TX-M Series TX550M


I have no idea if the power supply is overclocked, I don't know how to check or identify if it is. I have now set the memory to run at the XMP profile but it seems to still blue screen after a bit of time. The longest it stayed working was for 5 hours, until I shut the PC down. It seems like if I don't do anything demanding with ram it is less likely to blue screen. I'd like to also note that I have now gotten four different error codes.

Service Exception
Memory Management
Bad Pool Header
Kernel Security Check Failure

 

[Darkbreeze]

Power supplies don't get "overclocked". Processors or memory can be overclocked, along with a few other integrated aspects of the motherboard and also graphics cards, but mainly CPUs (Processors), memory (RAM) and graphics cards (GPU cards) are the items that are often overclocked. Power supplies have nothing that would need or could be, overclocked.

The first thing you should do is go to the manufacturer product page for your specific motherboard model and check to see if there is a newer bios version than the one you have installed. If there is, update it. This is ESSENTIAL for Ryzen memory compatibility. This alone may fix your problem. There should be BIOS image updates and instructions on how to do this available in the support section of the motherboard product page.


If updating the BIOS does not fix the problem, then I'd suggest going into the bios, finding the memory section and increasing the memory voltage by .005v or whatever the smallest increment it will allow you to increase it by is, then save changes and restart to see if the problem is gone.

I think the biggest problem you are going to have is the fact that those memory modules were never intended for use with AMD Ryzen systems and the profiles for speed, timings and voltage were meant for use with Intel hardware. So, while one stick may work getting a pair to work might be a different story. I would recommend doing a search to see if you can find verification that others have successfully used a pair of these modules on a first gen Ryzen platform. If so, then you can too, but it might take a bit more fiddling.

 

[tylerjlapierre]

Hey,

thanks for all of the assistance, it is truly appreciated, but after trying everything you've suggested (updating BIOS, setting XMP profile, voltage) and doing some experiments of my own (running the new stick by itself) I have come to the conclusion that this stick is just not going to work. When I ran it by itself it still blue screened, and when I put the old one back in by itself it ran fine. This gives me the idea that it could be faulty so I'm going to probably end up returning it and getting a pair as you suggested.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Yes, I agree that the stick is likely faulty AND getting a matched set is a very good idea. I would recommend trying to stick to modules known to be Ryzen compatible though. You can find user verified compatible model numbers at the following link:

https://www.overclock.net/forum/18051-memory/1627555-ryzen-memory-ic-collection-thread.html


As well as the QVL lists on the memory support page of your motherboard's manufacturers website and likely the AMD website as well.

Ryzen tends to like module using Samsung B-die IC's (memory chips)