 Welcome to an episode of Linus Tech Tips where I share my frustrations with you a little bit. I have, as some of you know, I have what I call the Linus Edition RAM. This is some older OCZ memory that was custom done for me. You can see there isn't even a part number on it or anything like that. You've probably never seen a black and blue color scheme like this with an XTC heat spreader. It was really really cool, really special. So I had 24 gigs of it. That's six by four gigs and it's like the coolest thing ever. I'm super proud of it. It's awesome. Whatever, it's broken now. So I was running into issues where the computer that was running it, you can see I only have five of the sticks here. One of the sticks is known good and it's in my wife's machine right now. So she has four gigs of memory, which I'd love to increase so that when I have to video edit on her machine, it's got enough memory and all that good stuff. So what happened was her machine started blue-screening randomly and I was only using three of the sticks in her machine at the time and so I pulled out memory, I swapped memory until I found one that wasn't causing problems anymore. And now I am left with the challenge of finding, you know, it's like out of five sticks now I have to find not only the one that I know is dead. So this is the one that seemed to be causing the problems with her machine. So what I did was I confirmed this one was dead by using prime 95 blend and I'll show you guys the settings I'm using later. This is why I hate overclocking memory because memory issues are so hard to diagnose and so hard to narrow down to what's working or what's not or what's causing the issue unless the rest of your system is a hundred percent completely rock solid. I wouldn't even begin to touch memory because it's much much more finicky. So that one's dead because what happened was I took four sticks and I ran them in quad channel on this motherboard. I set it to the settings. I know the memory works at so 1600 C9, 1.65 volts, default timings other than that, 1T command rate and I got errors after about eight hours. So I did every stick one by one all five of these sticks in dim slot one, ran them individually at the same settings. Remember guys, it's less stressful for the memory to run in individual mode than it is in a multi-channel mode. So this is the only one that actually failed. It failed after about ten hours of prime 95 blend. Which is very frustrating because it makes the whole process take a long time. So then I went, oh, yeah, okay, great. Everything must be good now. So all I have to do now is take the four remaining sticks and run them in quad channel and it'll pass. So after about ten hours it failed. Which means that at least one of the sticks in here is still bad even though it was able to run on its own. It can't run in a multi-channel configuration. So since then I have taken this one out and I tried to run these three and it failed. Then I took this one out and I put this one back in and tried to run these ones in triple channel and as you guys can see like that people ask me all the time, how long should I run my configuration in prime or some other stress test before I know it's stable and then I come back to them. I say 24 hours or 48 hours. They're like, oh, I ran it for three hours and it didn't you know fail. So it must be must be okay then right? No, no, no, it isn't because you see here torture test can encounter an error seven hours and 54 minutes in no problem. So the settings that I'm using here, so if your system makes a mathematical error, it is not stable. Now that error could cause any number of things to happen. It could cause a game to crash. It could cause a program to kind of lock up for a second. It could cause your entire operating system to corrupt. You don't know what an error will do until you have an error and it does something. So that's why I do not tolerate any errors in my machines and people who are like, yeah, yeah, I overclocked my CPU to whatever and pretty stable. It's game stable. No, no, game stable is not stable. Stable is stable. So to show you guys the settings I'm using, I'm using the blend preset and then I'm going custom and then I'm adjusting the memory to use to something near to what? So I'd go with something like that. I'd go, you know, let's use 11 and a half gigabytes if we're going to have 12 gigs of memory in there. So what I'm going to do now that I know I'm hoping it's only one more stick that's dead because they used to run in these settings just fine. So this one, remember, I know this one's dead. This one's going on the wall with the other legendary stuff. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to shut the system down. Like it takes days to diagnose a dead memory stick, especially with these multi-channel configurations we have now where you can have up to eight sticks of memory in a desktop machine. I mean, it's ridiculous. So now I've tested this, this, and this and I've tested this, this, and this and I'm still getting errors. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to put this guy back in and I'm going to take out one of these guys and we're going to see how that how that goes for us. It's always important when you're testing this kind of stuff, like if I put them in all the wrong slots then they might all be running in single channel mode. So you want to populate the the dim slots in the right order. So there's, there you go. See they're all labeled there. So I need to make sure I'm populating A1, B1, and yeah, there we go, and C1 in order to get this working. So the system shut down. Just going to go ahead and ground myself on the power supply here, turn the power supply off just because you never know when a system's going to, you know, go ahead and just turn itself on when you're in the middle of working on it, because it happens. Let me tell you, that was a scary one. I just like I plugged in a, I plugged in a PCI Express card and the system powered on before I'd even finished getting it into the slot. I was like, oh yay, dead card, dead board. They didn't die. They were okay, actually. Okay, so there you go. So now I'm going to see if maybe my stick B is dead. It's important to label stuff. I mean I can I can remember, but I, you know, especially when all the memory looks the same, it's important to make sure you actually do label things. So anyway, there we go. So then we're going to power it back up, and it's going to need another, oops, need to turn the power supply back on. Sorry. Power it back up, and hopefully it doesn't take another eight hours to find the error again, but I've already been working on this for days, and it's been very frustrating. So there you go guys. How to diagnose memory problems. Takes a while. Memtest 86 is another one, but it used to be, I mean just like Prime, it used to be a lot faster back when it didn't have to go through, you know, 12, 16, 24, 48 gigs of memory in order to find out if there was any kind of problem. Yeah, memory, yay. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos, and I hope this has been helpful. Remember guys, if you're having a stability issue with your system, the things to check, memory, make sure your memory is a hundred percent stable. Power supply. If memory isn't the problem, it's probably your power supply, and then you move on to your motherboard, and then you move on to, it's probably a software issue, unless you're, you know, your video card driver is crashing or something very specific, and you can go, okay, yeah, that's probably the video card. Thanks guys, take care.