BSOD cause by RAM?

[Dogeisilluminati]

I am currently running 2x4 sticks of G.SKILL RipjawsX 2133 Mhz ram http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231468. And a Kingston 2x8 1600 Mhz memory kit http://www.kingston.com/us/memory/search/?partid=ktd-xps730c/8g, and both kits are at 1600 Mhz. With this I have a total of 24 gigs of RAM. I have gotten the BSOD with this setup. My motherboard is an MSI Z97-G45 GAMING, and my cpu is an Intel Core i5-4690k. Anybody know what's going on? Should I change certain settings in BIOS? Lower/ higher voltages?

 

[jimmysmitty]

You should not run two kits from completely different companies. They are probably incompatible and what is causing your issue.

 

[Dogeisilluminati]

You should not run two kits from completely different companies. They are probably incompatible and what is causing your issue.

I've noticed that I go can go for sometime without getting the error, and it was working just fine for 3 days.

 

[jimmysmitty]

Working fine doesn't always mean fine. It could be that you were not using the memory in a way that caused it. The reason you don't want to mix vendors (hell you don't even want to mix kits from the same vendor) is because the ICs used for the RAM might be different, the sub timings might be different and most of all RAM is just picky.

I highly suggest against it. But if you wish to do it just remember that you are opening up a can of worms.

You could run Memtest86 and see if it is possible that maybe one stick went bad but that still could be caused by mismatched RAM.

 

[johnbl]

it depends on the bugcheck code. mostly bugchecks that involve memory management(0x1a) and have a error code of 0xc0000005 can be related to bad RAM settings.

if you think you have a problem with mixed RAM modules, update the BIOS to get the most up to date RAM timings for your motherboard, reboot and run memtest86 to confirm your RAM works as expected.

That being said, I find that most of the memory problems are actually caused by drivers corrupting the contents of memory. That is a driver overwrites another drivers data and crashes the second driver which causes the bugcheck. Since windows loads drivers in a different order on each boot, you get different bugcheck codes if and when the system does crash. There are various ways to find these types of problems, you can guess, try to update every driver, or run cmd.exe as an admin, then run
verifier.exe /standard /all
and reboot.
it will force windows to check the drivers and do a bugcheck if it finds a driver with certain common bugs. it will name the driver in the memory .dmp file.
you can use bluescreenviewer.exe or whocrashed.exe to take a first look at the memory dump to see if it names the bad driver. Or copy the memory dump to a server and post a link and someone with a windows debugger can take a quick look.

note: use
verifier.exe /reset
to turn off the checking when you are done testing or your machine will run slowly until you do.

 

[Tradesman1]

What is the DRAM currently running at, data rate, timings and voltage - can find the info with CPU-Z in the memory tab