Random Crashing (Possibly due to RAM corruption?)

[mickket435]

To be honest, it is quite hard to pinpoint which component is at fault here which is why I'll explain in detail what happened.


This initially occured while playing Witcher 3, everything went fine for 2 days until one day my computer completely froze. It left a frequency on repeat and I was forced to shut off my computer by holding the power button. This occured multiple times, leading my XPS 8300 to have a RAM failure (power button blinks 4 times, indicating a memory failure). However after letting my computer rest for an hour, it was perfectly fine, and there was no more RAM failure alerts.

However it wasn't over yet. This initial crash has lead to crashes in other games as well such as Dota 2 and Dirty Bomb. I decided to see if it was because of my graphics card causing the crash. Here is the results and settings when it crashed whilst in a game of Dota 2: http://imgur.com/2wL5Ub5

I had GPU-Z to see my gpu performance while playing and had task manager performance to monitor RAM and cpu. However from the image shown, it is clear that there is nothing wrong with either the RAM, cpu, or gpu. I even ran Windows Memory Diagnostic in order to detect any faulty RAM, but it said it did not detect any issues at all.

My computer only seems to crash under huge stress, such as playing games and running stress applications such as Prime95. What causes this? Could it actually be faulty ram from within my computer or is it something else that I don't know about?

 

[drtweak]

Well first thing is download Memtest86+ and either burn it to a CD/DVD or make it a bootable thumb drive and go from there.

 

[mickket435]

Well first thing is download Memtest86+ and either burn it to a CD/DVD or make it a bootable thumb drive and go from there.

But don't Windows Memory Diagnostic and MemTest do the same thing, or is MemTest more sophisticated in it's process or something?

I'll give it a test in a bit though, thanks for your help! I'll see if thats the issue.

 

[drtweak]

I like memtest better. If it fails you can tell after the first few minutes (bunch of red stuff) Plus Memtest you can run and run and run and really stress it. the windows memtest just does like a one or two pass check where as there are all kinds of test that memtest does. let it run for a few hours.

Also if you have an android table/phone look into trigonesoft.com and check out their remote monitor software. you can check everything from one spot while in full screen on a game and see a bit more what happens. See if there is a v drop or something else that is causing that is causing issues like over heating or something.

 

[mickket435]

I like memtest better. If it fails you can tell after the first few minutes (bunch of red stuff) Plus Memtest you can run and run and run and really stress it. the windows memtest just does like a one or two pass check where as there are all kinds of test that memtest does. let it run for a few hours.

Also if you have an android table/phone look into trigonesoft.com and check out their remote monitor software. you can check everything from one spot while in full screen on a game and see a bit more what happens. See if there is a v drop or something else that is causing that is causing issues like over heating or something.

http://imgur.com/VP8ZNGn
So I got this. I'm assuming from all the jumbled words that there is a corrupted RAM stick. If thats the case what are the possibilities of fixing this? Like should I just like remove it from the computer and like blow on it or something (sounds stupid I know) or should I just definitely buy new RAM?

 

[drtweak]

Yea looks like you have a bad stick of ram somewhere. If you have more than 1 Stick of ram which i'm assuming you do put them in one at a time and see which one gets the errors when you run it. There is your bad stick.