System instability due to wrong RAM

[Sire_Hank]

Good day everyone and i hope you are having a great day,

i am new to this Forum and came here because i got a specific, or actually multiple, question(s) about my Hardware and iam glad that a place like this exists!

 

Let me begin a little earlier to lay down the whole problem that i am facing.
I built my pc 2-3 ago to replace my previous system.

My Specs were! : (i made some changes later... hold on)

• Mainboard: MSI Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon
• CPU: Intel i7 7700k
• RAM: 2x 8GB Corsair LPX Vengeance 2400 C16
• Graphicscard: Nvidia gtx960 (transfered from old pc)
• PSU: be quiet! Straight Power 10 500W
   

The 960 was a relict from my old pc and did its job for a long time, because iam not too much of an enthusiast when it comes to graphics in gaming.
But i did need some power for certain programs like Photoshop. 
I started off with only 16GB of RAM, because my money was limited at that time, but it got annoying to run out of ram whenever i worked with programs like Photoshop. So i upgraded the pc with another bar of 16GB RAM.
Same manufacturer, same clock speed, same busspeed? just a different size.
The two 8GB were built into the sockets for dualchanneling i think they are slots 2A and 2B? and the 16GB was in 1A? (i know the 8GB were in the right slots because its also marked on the Mainboard, so it doesnt matter that much if i forgot the naming of the channels)

So that worked fine... really. Photoshop was happy, i was happy and i could play games just perfectly.

So a year ago i bought a Gigabyte rtx 2070 Gamining OC 8GB.
That did not work. :'D
After some time in games i would get Bsod's or the game would just silently crash if i was lucky.
I was in almost daily correspondence with the Nvidia Support for almost a month.

To sum it up: we didnt find the issue. We tried a lot of things.
Downclocking the gpu, because nvidia thought Gigabyte fucked up their gpu.
Lowering the Powerlimit of the gpu.
Doing Benchmarks... trying different versions of drivers which caused different kinds of issues.

 

Last call by the support was that my PSU wasn't sufficient.
The 2070 i supposed to have a 650W PSU which is 100W over my own.
i get that... if the PSU bottlenecks then the cpu or the gpu do miscalculations and end up crashing the system.
That's kinda like overclocking a system... it will get unstable to some degree.

But i was stubborn... i tested the power consumption of my pc, i looked in the datasheet of the psu if the 12V channels have a limit to them (they don't) and i did stress tests.
I ran benchmarks that would max out both cpu and gpu and i never got over around 400W of power consumption.
Funny thing is... i never! got even one bsod while stressing the pc.
And i could also turn down the graphics in the game and play with graphics from around the year 2000 and would still get bsods but never even once in a benchmark.
The other funfact is that some games would crash the pc and some just wouldnt.

So in my opinion that would rule out the PSU.

I was pissed and returned the card!
.

.

.

A couple of month ago i started to get more bsods with my gtx960
Definetly rules out the PSU in my opinion because that old brick consumes something like a 120W?

The bsods were all hinting to either drivers or the ram or hardware issues.
It was almost never the same issue and i was too lazy and busy to look into it when it only crashed like a couple of times a month.
Over the last few weeks it would go up to at least one bsod a day though(only when i was playing or one time when rendering) and that worried me.
I thought it might be the card slowly crapping out after 3-4 years of service. So i bought another rtx 2070, this time from msi.

Same issue.

I tested around a little and read out one of the bsods.
It was a SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION(b3)
Those are usually caused by the gpu or the RAM or drivers... who would have thought.
The error was caused by a 0x0005, which basically is a Null-Pointer caused by something trying to read somewhere or something that didnt exist.

 

That doesnt really mean anything, because it still could be the gpu passing on corrupt data or the psu causing corrupt data.

Corsair Customer service is currently not available so i called msi, because i thought they might know some things about RAM-usage on their mainboard. They cut me off before i even asked my question.
MSI Service: "usually it is unwise to use an uneven number of RAM Sticks but that shouldnt be the issue... i am 90% sure it is your PSU"

So i tested the ram again but it seemed alright.
Took it out and back in.
After getting another crash i tried testing them one by one.

So i went back to the original setting of 2x 8GB in dualchannel mode and i have had no bsod since then; only one gamecrash.
 

 

Was that the issue? Or did it only amplify another problem and i was just lucky that it didnt happen since then.

I am not ruling out things anymore but it seemed stable so far.
The crash that i got in "Rise of the Tomb Raider" was a stuttering and then a silent closing of the game.
But i think the game has a few bugs... For some stupid reason it tries to load new regions all at once sometimes and it maxes out my i7 for a couple of seconds before it goes on where it left off.

On average it runs around 20-30% and then spikes around 96% or whatever is left by the rest of the system before it goes down to normal after a few seconds.
I havent payed that much attention to it but i think neither disk nor ram nor gpu are overly active at those times?
Is that another issue maybe in a different costume?

If that is just the game:

How do i approach the issue of restocking my RAM, because 16GB are far too less for working with PS or even having chrome open while playing a game.

Do i buy another 16GB so i can put the two 16GB in Dual channeling?
Can i run the 2x8 and 2x16 simultaneously?
Should i buy 2x8 so i have 4 8Gb?

Or do i get a new PSU?



Thanks a lot in advance for everyone that bothered to read till the end

I hope i did everything right with the creation of this post and i apologize if i didn't.
I also apologize for the length of the post.

[Enzo1001]

9 minutes ago, Sire_Hank said:

Good day everyone and i hope you are having a great day,

i am new to this Forum and came here because i got a specific, or actually multiple, question(s) about my Hardware and iam glad that a place like this exists!

 

Let me begin a little earlier to lay down the whole problem that i am facing.
I built my pc 2-3 ago to replace my previous system.

My Specs were! : (i made some changes later... hold on)

• Mainboard: MSI Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon
• CPU: Intel i7 7700k
• RAM: 2x 8GB Corsair LPX Vengeance 2400 C16
• Graphicscard: Nvidia gtx960 (transfered from old pc)
• PSU: be quiet! Straight Power 10 500W
   

The 960 was a relict from my old pc and did its job for a long time, because iam not too much of an enthusiast when it comes to graphics in gaming.
But i did need some power for certain programs like Photoshop. 
I started off with only 16GB of RAM, because my money was limited at that time, but it got annoying to run out of ram whenever i worked with programs like Photoshop. So i upgraded the pc with another bar of 16GB RAM.
Same manufacturer, same clock speed, same busspeed? just a different size.
The two 8GB were built into the sockets for dualchanneling i think they are slots 2A and 2B? and the 16GB was in 1A? (i know the 8GB were in the right slots because its also marked on the Mainboard, so it doesnt matter that much if i forgot the naming of the channels)

So that worked fine... really. Photoshop was happy, i was happy and i could play games just perfectly.

So a year ago i bought a Gigabyte rtx 2070 Gamining OC 8GB.
That did not work. :'D
After some time in games i would get Bsod's or the game would just silently crash if i was lucky.
I was in almost daily correspondence with the Nvidia Support for almost a month.

To sum it up: we didnt find the issue. We tried a lot of things.
Downclocking the gpu, because nvidia thought Gigabyte fucked up their gpu.
Lowering the Powerlimit of the gpu.
Doing Benchmarks... trying different versions of drivers which caused different kinds of issues.

 

Last call by the support was that my PSU wasn't sufficient.
The 2070 i supposed to have a 650W PSU which is 100W over my own.
i get that... if the PSU bottlenecks then the cpu or the gpu do miscalculations and end up crashing the system.
That's kinda like overclocking a system... it will get unstable to some degree.

But i was stubborn... i tested the power consumption of my pc, i looked in the datasheet of the psu if the 12V channels have a limit to them (they don't) and i did stress tests.
I ran benchmarks that would max out both cpu and gpu and i never got over around 400W of power consumption.
Funny thing is... i never! got even one bsod while stressing the pc.
And i could also turn down the graphics in the game and play with graphics from around the year 2000 and would still get bsods but never even once in a benchmark.
The other funfact is that some games would crash the pc and some just wouldnt.

So in my opinion that would rule out the PSU.

I was pissed and returned the card!
.

.

.

A couple of month ago i started to get more bsods with my gtx960
Definetly rules out the PSU in my opinion because that old brick consumes something like a 120W?

The bsods were all hinting to either drivers or the ram or hardware issues.
It was almost never the same issue and i was too lazy and busy to look into it when it only crashed like a couple of times a month.
Over the last few weeks it would go up to at least one bsod a day though(only when i was playing or one time when rendering) and that worried me.
I thought it might be the card slowly crapping out after 3-4 years of service. So i bought another rtx 2070, this time from msi.

Same issue.

I tested around a little and read out one of the bsods.
It was a SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION(b3)
Those are usually caused by the gpu or the RAM or drivers... who would have thought.
The error was caused by a 0x0005, which basically is a Null-Pointer caused by something trying to read somewhere or something that didnt exist.

 

That doesnt really mean anything, because it still could be the gpu passing on corrupt data or the psu causing corrupt data.

Corsair Customer service is currently not available so i called msi, because i thought they might know some things about RAM-usage on their mainboard. They cut me off before i even asked my question.
MSI Service: "usually it is unwise to use an uneven number of RAM Sticks but that shouldnt be the issue... i am 90% sure it is your PSU"

So i tested the ram again but it seemed alright.
Took it out and back in.
After getting another crash i tried testing them one by one.

So i went back to the original setting of 2x 8GB in dualchannel mode and i have had no bsod since then; only one gamecrash.
 

 

Was that the issue? Or did it only amplify another problem and i was just lucky that it didnt happen since then.

I am not ruling out things anymore but it seemed stable so far.
The crash that i got in "Rise of the Tomb Raider" was a stuttering and then a silent closing of the game.
But i think the game has a few bugs... For some stupid reason it tries to load new regions all at once sometimes and it maxes out my i7 for a couple of seconds before it goes on where it left off.

On average it runs around 20-30% and then spikes around 96% or whatever is left by the rest of the system before it goes down to normal after a few seconds.
I havent payed that much attention to it but i think neither disk nor ram nor gpu are overly active at those times?
Is that another issue maybe in a different costume?

If that is just the game:

How do i approach the issue of restocking my RAM, because 16GB are far too less for working with PS or even having chrome open while playing a game.

Do i buy another 16GB so i can put the two 16GB in Dual channeling?
Can i run the 2x8 and 2x16 simultaneously?
Should i buy 2x8 so i have 4 8Gb?

Or do i get a new PSU?



Thanks a lot in advance for everyone that bothered to read till the end

I hope i did everything right with the creation of this post and i apologize if i didn't.
I also apologize for the length of the post.

i would get a new psu there are great cheap options out there, mine is an evga 700 watt one that i got for around 75 euros

[UpTheDons]

14 minutes ago, Sire_Hank said:

Good day everyone and i hope you are having a great day,

i am new to this Forum and came here because i got a specific, or actually multiple, question(s) about my Hardware and iam glad that a place like this exists!

 

Let me begin a little earlier to lay down the whole problem that i am facing.
I built my pc 2-3 ago to replace my previous system.

My Specs were! : (i made some changes later... hold on)

• Mainboard: MSI Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon
• CPU: Intel i7 7700k
• RAM: 2x 8GB Corsair LPX Vengeance 2400 C16
• Graphicscard: Nvidia gtx960 (transfered from old pc)
• PSU: be quiet! Straight Power 10 500W
   

The 960 was a relict from my old pc and did its job for a long time, because iam not too much of an enthusiast when it comes to graphics in gaming.
But i did need some power for certain programs like Photoshop. 
I started off with only 16GB of RAM, because my money was limited at that time, but it got annoying to run out of ram whenever i worked with programs like Photoshop. So i upgraded the pc with another bar of 16GB RAM.
Same manufacturer, same clock speed, same busspeed? just a different size.
The two 8GB were built into the sockets for dualchanneling i think they are slots 2A and 2B? and the 16GB was in 1A? (i know the 8GB were in the right slots because its also marked on the Mainboard, so it doesnt matter that much if i forgot the naming of the channels)

So that worked fine... really. Photoshop was happy, i was happy and i could play games just perfectly.

So a year ago i bought a Gigabyte rtx 2070 Gamining OC 8GB.
That did not work. :'D
After some time in games i would get Bsod's or the game would just silently crash if i was lucky.
I was in almost daily correspondence with the Nvidia Support for almost a month.

To sum it up: we didnt find the issue. We tried a lot of things.
Downclocking the gpu, because nvidia thought Gigabyte fucked up their gpu.
Lowering the Powerlimit of the gpu.
Doing Benchmarks... trying different versions of drivers which caused different kinds of issues.

 

Last call by the support was that my PSU wasn't sufficient.
The 2070 i supposed to have a 650W PSU which is 100W over my own.
i get that... if the PSU bottlenecks then the cpu or the gpu do miscalculations and end up crashing the system.
That's kinda like overclocking a system... it will get unstable to some degree.

But i was stubborn... i tested the power consumption of my pc, i looked in the datasheet of the psu if the 12V channels have a limit to them (they don't) and i did stress tests.
I ran benchmarks that would max out both cpu and gpu and i never got over around 400W of power consumption.
Funny thing is... i never! got even one bsod while stressing the pc.
And i could also turn down the graphics in the game and play with graphics from around the year 2000 and would still get bsods but never even once in a benchmark.
The other funfact is that some games would crash the pc and some just wouldnt.

So in my opinion that would rule out the PSU.

I was pissed and returned the card!
.

.

.

A couple of month ago i started to get more bsods with my gtx960
Definetly rules out the PSU in my opinion because that old brick consumes something like a 120W?

The bsods were all hinting to either drivers or the ram or hardware issues.
It was almost never the same issue and i was too lazy and busy to look into it when it only crashed like a couple of times a month.
Over the last few weeks it would go up to at least one bsod a day though(only when i was playing or one time when rendering) and that worried me.
I thought it might be the card slowly crapping out after 3-4 years of service. So i bought another rtx 2070, this time from msi.

Same issue.

I tested around a little and read out one of the bsods.
It was a SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION(b3)
Those are usually caused by the gpu or the RAM or drivers... who would have thought.
The error was caused by a 0x0005, which basically is a Null-Pointer caused by something trying to read somewhere or something that didnt exist.

 

That doesnt really mean anything, because it still could be the gpu passing on corrupt data or the psu causing corrupt data.

Corsair Customer service is currently not available so i called msi, because i thought they might know some things about RAM-usage on their mainboard. They cut me off before i even asked my question.
MSI Service: "usually it is unwise to use an uneven number of RAM Sticks but that shouldnt be the issue... i am 90% sure it is your PSU"

So i tested the ram again but it seemed alright.
Took it out and back in.
After getting another crash i tried testing them one by one.

So i went back to the original setting of 2x 8GB in dualchannel mode and i have had no bsod since then; only one gamecrash.
 

 

Was that the issue? Or did it only amplify another problem and i was just lucky that it didnt happen since then.

I am not ruling out things anymore but it seemed stable so far.
The crash that i got in "Rise of the Tomb Raider" was a stuttering and then a silent closing of the game.
But i think the game has a few bugs... For some stupid reason it tries to load new regions all at once sometimes and it maxes out my i7 for a couple of seconds before it goes on where it left off.

On average it runs around 20-30% and then spikes around 96% or whatever is left by the rest of the system before it goes down to normal after a few seconds.
I havent payed that much attention to it but i think neither disk nor ram nor gpu are overly active at those times?
Is that another issue maybe in a different costume?

If that is just the game:

How do i approach the issue of restocking my RAM, because 16GB are far too less for working with PS or even having chrome open while playing a game.

Do i buy another 16GB so i can put the two 16GB in Dual channeling?
Can i run the 2x8 and 2x16 simultaneously?
Should i buy 2x8 so i have 4 8Gb?

Or do i get a new PSU?



Thanks a lot in advance for everyone that bothered to read till the end

I hope i did everything right with the creation of this post and i apologize if i didn't.
I also apologize for the length of the post.

get a new psu i think.

[TrigrH]

12 minutes ago, Sire_Hank said:

snip

have you updated your bios? you dont need a new PSU.

[kcabtonmai]

There should not be a problem running different size RAM modules, if they are the same models. Double check for model part number, the only difference there should be 8 vs 16.

I'm currently running 4gb and 8gb ram modules and having no issues at all.

 

Have you tried clean install of windows?

It seems that there were no issues prior to upgrading GPU and drivers. Try to DDU before clean install.

[Sire_Hank]

2 hours ago, TrigrH said:

have you updated your bios? you dont need a new PSU.

current version is 1.90... the newest on the website is v19... i think that is one and the same even tho the release date in the command center says 07-03-2018 and the one on the website 2018-07-16.
Updating my Bios was one of the first things i did back in 2019.
Also Live Update by MSI doesnt suggest new drivers or a new Bios.
 

 

1 hour ago, kcabtonmai said:

There should not be a problem running different size RAM modules, if they are the same models. Double check for model part number, the only difference there should be 8 vs 16.

I just double checked the parts.
MSI Command Center says everything but one number is the same... but i think that number is irrelevant?
partnr:
CMK16GX4M1A2400C16 for the 16GB
CMK16GX4M2A2400C16 for both 8GB
Note the 1 and the 2 in the middle.

 

both have 16-16-16-39 written.

1 hour ago, kcabtonmai said:

Have you tried clean install of windows?

It seems that there were no issues prior to upgrading GPU and drivers. Try to DDU before clean install.

Clean installation of windows would have been the next step.... but as i said, removing the ram changed something?


I used DDU multiple times back in the day when trying different versions.
I also used DDU with the gtx960... cleaned all drivers with it, then swapped to the 2070 and installed the newest drivers.


EDIT: M1 and M2 seem to refer to different products 
M1 being 16GB in 1 bar M2 being 16GB in 2 bars
 

Edited May 19, 2020 by Sire_Hank
New information

[Sire_Hank]

Update:
Sorry for the long silence. For personal reasons i was unable to check on my pc for a while.
Anyway....

Removing and reseating the RAM seems to have fixed the BSOD's
Don't ask me why, but since removing and putting the RAM back in i hav not experienced a single BSOD.


But another issue popped up when i used the PC again after a few days of doing nothing.

I was experiencing severe lags that caused even my mouse to stutter even without my PC being used in any way.
I downloaded LatencyMon and DPC Latency and checked my drivers.
Several different drivers seemed to have caused it and sometimes i felt that i fixed it with working on one driver and then suddenly it came back with a different driver, sometimes even System related ones like ndis.sys which refers to the networkcard (which got fixed by uninstalling Realtek Audio Drivers) but also the nVidia drivers and the Wdf01000.sys or whatever it is called.

I got so frustrated over it that i bought a new SSD and made a fresh installation of Win10.

so faaaar i have had only one mouse lag, but that seemed to be caused by my usb-c hub, so putting the mouse somewhere else helped.

so since then i have played the new ori a few hours, which interestingly even makes the 2070 grow warm.
I've had two or three gamecrashes so far, but those seem to be related to the badly written game. (I have other people seen complain about the buggy game.)
One crash was announced by the sound going weird like a minute before the crash.
I am just mentioning that because those latency issues i had are 90% mentioned by people using external Soundhardware.
And i have a small Mixer by Allen&Heath which had previous driver issues and didnt work for a year because Microsoft changed something with their Soundsystem and basically killed 80% of professional Hardware with it :)

Only thing why i came back here was one single blackout that i experienced.
So pc shut off without a warning.

Usually those are caused by overheating or failure of the PSU if i am not mistaken.

So i did a stresstest with Cpu-Z and furmark pushing both CPU and Graphics card into their TDP.
Nothing happened.
Temperatur of the CPU got a little bit high with 84 degrees (after 10 minutes) but that still is ok.
GPU was somewhere around 60-70.
 

 

Does a game stress the graphics card more because it uses the VRAM too?

 

Could a blackout be caused by a malfunction of CPU? OR Mainboard? OR RAM?

Or is that like a 100% proof that it is the PSU?

Does someone have any ideas for more tests?


Thanks a lot in advance!



 

[Sire_Hank]

Update2:
I found a software called HWInfo that confirms that my hardware only uses around 300-400 W when stressed.


Been playing games for a couple of hours today with no issues until i got a random bsod.

As i said before, this is a new Win10 on a new SSD, so there are no unnecessary drivers at present.

I will upload the minidump here.

As far as i can tell from it there is another issue with the RAM with an accessviolation caused by the dwm.exe which is the windows desktopmanager.
I have seen that process having an unusual high usage of gpu power earlier that day.

The BSOD happened while playing ori tho, so it might be just coincidence and the actual cause might lie somewhere else.
With the software being all new it seems to be a hardware related issue... yay.

Any idea?

061020-7296-01.dmp