Memory or motherboard issues?

Hello!

In short:

My current problem is that I get intermittent BSODs of type 'MEMORY_MANAGEMENT' and others, general system instability, and some spontaneous reboots.

This prompted a memtest, which resulted in over 400k errors, which in turn made me attempt to test each stick of memory by itself, but no configuration other than the initial one will boot.

Could this be a motherboard issue, or is it a memory issue?

The full story with more detail:

The issues started while playing relatively demanding fullscreen games a couple of weeks back. My displays would suddenly go dark, the sound would glitch out and/or loop,

and the system itself would (apparently) hardlock.

After some research, I marked this down to unrecoverable display driver crashes, and tried disabling SLI. No dice.

Then I tried actually disabling the card in slot #1 (the 780Ti SC) in my device manager, thus also disabling SLI completely, and plug both my screens over to the second card.

This seemed to work without issues, except for a huge hassle on reboot, as I would have to plug one screen back to (the disabled) card #1 to be able to get into windows, then re-enable card #1

and reboot, THEN plug the screen back to #2 and disable #1 again. Whew.

At any rate, this worked without crashing for about a week. Then weird stuff started happening. Chrome tabs would crash or fail to load, dropbox and google drive would crash on startup,

and the system would occasionally just reboot spontaneously.

Figuring this might be because of my ‘unconventional’ GPU setup, I removed the card in slot #1, and replaced it with the card from slot #2, taking the #1 card out completely.

This is when the BSODs started happening.

To test whether or not card #1 was, in fact, broken, I ran some 3Dmark stress tests on card #2 (now in slot #1). They ran fine, but as soon as I attempted to run a regular benchmark,

the system crashed with a MEMORY_MANAGEMENT stop error. Upon reboot I was greeted by another identical bluescreen about 5-10 seconds after logging into windows.

These bluescreens have been popping up intermittently since then.

Because of the memory-related error message, I figured I might as well try a Windows Memory Diagnostic and see if any errors popped up, but the test came out clean after 2 passes.

Believing this had to be a mistake, I ran Memtest from a USB stick.

Memtest would consistently crash on test #1 or #2 with an error saying it couldn’t start CPU 0, so I had to disable the first two tests to get it to run at all.

I ran the remaining tests for 4 passes, and was presented with a little over 400,000 errors.

You can take a look at the memtest log itself here.

Being fairly confident in that I’d narrowed this down to a memory issue, I then started the process of testing each stick on its own to isolate the faulty module, but no configuration of memory

sticks other than my initial configuration would boot at all.

Here are my test results in more detail:

Orig config (rotated 90 degrees clockwise):

DIMM Slot A1 - Serial No. 348325
DIMM Slot A2 - 
DIMM Slot B1 - Serial No. 348324
DIMM Slot B2 -

CPU SOCKET

DIMM Slot D2 -
DIMM Slot D1 - Serial No. 348322
DIMM Slot C2 -
DIMM Slot C1 - Serial No. 348323

(This is the config ASUS recommends for this mobo)

Test 1:
A1 - 348325
A2 -
B1 -
B2 - 

D2 -
D1 - 
C2 -
C1 - 
Result:
PC reboots after 20~ seconds, no display output at all. No beeps. Loops endlessly.

Test 2:
A1 - 
A2 -
B1 - 348324
B2 -


D2 -
D1 - 
C2 -
C1 - 
Result:
Same as test 1

Test 3:
A1 - 
A2 -
B1 -
B2 - 


D2 -
D1 - 348322
C2 -
C1 - 
Result:
Same as test 1 

Test 4:
A1 - 
A2 -
B1 -
B2 - 


D2 -
D1 - 
C2 -
C1 - 348323
Result:
Same as test 1 

Control test because wtf:
A1 - 348325
A2 -
B1 - 348324
B2 -

D2 -
D1 - 348322
C2 -
C1 - 348323
Result: 
Normal boot to windows without issues.

Test 5:
A1 - 
A2 -
B1 - 348324
B2 -

D2 -
D1 - 348322
C2 -
C1 - 348323
Result:
Same as test 1 

Test 6:
A1 - 
A2 -
B1 - 348324
B2 -

D2 -
D1 -
C2 - 
C1 - 348323
Result:
Same as test 1

Test 7:
A1 -
A2 - 348325
B1 -
B2 - 348324

D2 - 348322
D1 -
C2 - 348323
C1 -
Result:
No reboot, but no display output. No beeps. No response to any kb+m input.

## I reset the CMOS at this point ##

Test 8:
A1 -
A2 - 348325
B1 -
B2 - 348324

D2 - 348322
D1 -
C2 - 348323
C1 -
Result:
Same as test 7

Control test 2:
A1 - 348325
A2 -
B1 - 348324
B2 -

D2 -
D1 - 348322
C2 -
C1 - 348323
Result:  
Normal boot, but since the BIOS is back to defaults, the system will not pass POST because it can’t find the CPU Fan (what).
Setting the CPU fan to manual 100% fixes this error.
(This error has not happened before BSODs started happening.)

And now I’m here.

I’m sort of at a loss at this point. I’m reasonably certain that the problem lies either with the memory or the motherboard, but I don’t know how to proceed to narrow it down further.

Any help would be appreciated!

After clearing the CMOS a second time, the system will now boot with only one memory module installed, and I have been able to test two of my four sticks.

Both runs came out with 0 errors after 4 passes, with all 12 tests enabled in Memtest, but upon booting into windows I got a bluescreen with no specific error message.

I'll test the remaining two modules after work today and update this thread with my results.

I got a bluescreen with no specific error message.

Are there any dump files in C:\Windows\Minidump that report the error when you analyse them?

If you are getting BSODs you can use WINDBG (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/hh852365.aspx) to analyse the dump files in C:\Windows\Minidump\. This will usually tell you which driver caused the issue which I would report as a bug to the driver vendor.

 

After opening the .DMP file set srv*C:\Windows\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols as the symbol search path and issue the command !analyze -v. C:\Windows\symbols is the default symbol cache which you may wish to change.