Hello, friends!

 

Some of you may have seen the recent thread on BSOD's where a few folks, mostly Alain (alainneedle1) and TechguyMaxC, were generously helping me solve the mistery of my frequent blue screens.

Now I can report with 99% certainty it is bad RAM. After all BIOS settings and driver clean-ups failed in the long term and my HDD turned out to be OK, I concentrated on RAM again.

 

I am after a week test and the result is very convincing. My system left on one (of my 2) 4GB RAM stick had no BSOD for 5 days (the longest BSOD-free period I've had for a long time).

This morning I exchanged the stick to the other one and it was no more than an hour when I got a BSOD again. Looks like the puzzle is solved and I need to get a new RAM.

 

Now I would like to kindly request you, hardware experts, to advice me on RAM exchange. Should I just buy another stick of the same RAM I had so far and replace the bad one (they were used for 9 months)?

Or should I use this occasion to buy some new different / better memory (I am ready for that and, since RAM is not very expensive, I may willingly go for it)?

If the latter, then what good model would you, both hardware and flightsim experts, recommend?

 

My unlucky RAM now is still 2x4GB (4096MB) DDR3 Corsair Vengeance 1600 MHz 9-9-9-24 1.50v v2.12.

My mobo (I wonder if these two like each other, which I know is not always the case) is Gigabyte Z68M-D2H.

Glad you got to the bottom of things! 2133MHz is probably the best you can do on a Z68 board, and I would recommend it given the low low price of RAM now. G.Skill and Corsair are probably the best brands now, lots of options out there though and as long as you've heard of them before, it's probably an alright choice. The key when selecting RAM is to get the highest clockspeed your board will support (2133 in your case) and the lowest overall timings (ex: 9-11-11-11 vs. 10-12-12-12) you can for the least amount of money. You can expect to pay around $50 for a good 8GB 2133 kit at the moment.

IF its under warannty send both back and get the same pair of of the same model.

 

Although the prices of RAM keeps coming down and there are faster memory out there that can be had for 100$ or less.. with that MB/

CPU, it may not utilize the faster memory. So may as well use the waranntly get a replacement without spending any money (apart from return postage)

 

Manny

Thank you very much TechguyMaxC and Manny!

 

I will probably follow the advice of both of you. Buying a better RAM (let it be the 2133 MHZ) is something I am very willing to do.

On the other hand if I send my Vengeance sticks on warranty and get new ones, I can then decide what to do with them. :wink:

 

Thanks again, I'm off to check offers and prices.