My PC RAM nightmare

[ItsOnePixel]

I built my gaming PC a year ago - it has Ryzen 3700x CPU,  ASUS ROG Strix B450-F Gaming 2 motherboard, GTX 1650, a Cooler Master 650 Watt PSU and 16 GB of Corsair Vengeance RGB ram. Everything was running smoothly. Recently, I decided to add an extra 16 gb of ram to my two empty slots. I received a couple bluescreens after that, but later the bluescreens went away and everything worked fine. Now, I noticed that my ram was running at 2666mhz, so I set it to the default 3600mhz in the bios. And from this point onwards, my PC just keeps randomly bluescreening every 5 or so hours. I have no idea how to fix it. Can you please help me? Feel free to ask me any questions if needed.

[SimplyGone]

Zen 2 also had weak memory controllers.  enable XMP  and try manually setting the RAM speed to 3200 instead.  If that clears up the blue screens leave it at that.  I seem to remember Zen 2's 'sweet spot' was 3200 when it came to RAM.  You may have just been lucking out to have two sticks running at 3600 all this time

[ItsOnePixel]

On 2/16/2023 at 8:58 PM, billbill said:

The RAM is best to have an exact match with all of the sticks. That may cause an issue if they do not match. 

The sticks are all exactly the same.

[Asnor]

If you buy 2 modules and then decide to upgrade later on with 2 more, they might not run stable when you turn on the DOCP/XMP profile. I think that's the reason why it is recommended to buy a new kit with 4 modules if you wanna avoid the headache of manually tuning the timings. But at that point I would rather just get two 16 GB DIMMs and run with dual channel, provided you have the spare money.

 

[problemsolver]

On 2/16/2023 at 2:53 PM, ItsOnePixel said:

I built my gaming PC a year ago - it has Ryzen 3700x CPU,  ASUS ROG Strix B450-F Gaming 2 motherboard, GTX 1650, a Cooler Master 650 Watt PSU and 16 GB of Corsair Vengeance RGB ram. Everything was running smoothly. Recently, I decided to add an extra 16 gb of ram to my two empty slots. I received a couple bluescreens after that, but later the bluescreens went away and everything worked fine. Now, I noticed that my ram was running at 2666mhz, so I set it to the default 3600mhz in the bios. And from this point onwards, my PC just keeps randomly bluescreening every 5 or so hours. I have no idea how to fix it. Can you please help me? Feel free to ask me any questions if needed.

 

Bump your DRAM Voltage, CCD, IOD, and SOC voltages up by one or two increments in the BIOS.

• If it boots, you can then lower them one at a time to determine what actually needs to be raised.  If it doesn't boot, try raising them another increment and test again.

This is fairly common when loading 4 sticks of RAM (especially if it's 4. dual-rank sticks--which I'm guessing it is, since you added 2 sticks.) on Zen 2 or Zen 3 with overclocked RAM (just because something has an XMP profile doesn't mean it's not overclocked) as the CPU's memory controller (as SimplyChunky mentioned) and sometimes MOBO DRAM voltages can be insufficient.  Remember to run 3200Mhz, you're now overclocking, so messing with voltages is very common.

 

WARNING:  If you go crazy raising voltages you can 100% permanently damage component(s) in your system.

 

If you've raised them several increments and nothing seems to be improving, probably best to stop the experiment and drop us a note.

 

If it's a success, mark this post as the solution and write down your new voltages somewhere so that when you update/reset the BIOS, you can get your computer booting easily.  (You will likely forget the values, and saving BIOS settings to the motherboard and restoring them can cause issues after BIOS updates.)

[ItsOnePixel]

On 2/16/2023 at 9:09 PM, SimplyChunk said:

Zen 2 also had weak memory controllers.  enable XMP  and try manually setting the RAM speed to 3200 instead.  If that clears up the blue screens leave it at that.  I seem to remember Zen 2's 'sweet spot' was 3200 when it came to RAM.  You may have just been lucking out to have two sticks running at 3600 all this time

This was only a temporary solution. I will try reinstalling windows to see if that works.

[Mark Kaine]

On 3/1/2023 at 8:19 AM, problemsolver said:

 

Bump your DRAM Voltage, CCD, IOD, and SOC voltages up by one or two increments in the BIOS.

• If it boots, you can then lower them one at a time to determine what actually needs to be raised.  If it doesn't boot, try raising them another increment and test again.

This is fairly common when loading 4 sticks of RAM (especially if it's 4 dual-rank sticks which I'm guessing it is, since they're sold in pairs) on Zen 2 or Zen 3 with overclocked RAM (just because something has an XMP profile doesn't mean it's not overclocked) as the CPU's memory controller (as SimplyChunky mentioned) and sometimes MOBO DRAM voltages can be insufficient.  Remember to run 3200Mhz, you're now overclocking, so messing with voltages is very common.

 

WARNING:  If you go crazy raising voltages you can 100% permanently damage component(s) in your system.

 

If you've raised them several increments and nothing seems to be improving, probably best to stop the experiment and drop us a note.

 

If it's a success, mark this post as the solution and write down your new voltages somewhere so that when you update/reset the BIOS, you can get your computer booting easily.  (You will likely forget the values, and saving BIOS settings to the motherboard and restoring them can cause issues after BIOS updates.)

To add to this you can also look up the max voltage for the RAM and simply don't go over - shouldn't be necessary for 3200 anyways  - for example my old corsair Vengeance wouldn't boot with the standard 1.35v, but 1.36v was a go ? (and that was also what XMP set it to automatically) 

ps: also worth noting likely the timings need to be loosened manually... thats the whole deal about tuning low budget ram like corsair Vengeance... and then ideally subtimings too because thats where any performance gains come from usually.

 

On 2/16/2023 at 9:09 PM, SimplyChunk said:

You may have just been lucking out to have two sticks running at 3600 all this time

possibly,  however my 3200 Trident Z had no issues running at 3600 on my r5 3600, just had to loosen timings a bit (im still running the exactly same settings on my 5800X3D now, could probably do more, but who cares, certainly not the 5800X3D... )

 

On 2/16/2023 at 8:53 PM, ItsOnePixel said:

Can you please help me?

actually you cant just mix and match ram like this, i would recommend either run 2 sticks or if you need to run 4 for whatever reason then run it at default speeds, the performance impact isnt that big generally.  otherwise learn to tune your ram, or buy a proper kit, preferably 2 sticks. 

[problemsolver]

18 hours ago, ItsOnePixel said:

This was only a temporary solution. I will try reinstalling windows to see if that works.

It was likely temporary because the RAM in combination with your processor is the issue & being on the edge of stability can behave like you've described. I would recommend bumping voltage and/or loosening timings like @Mark Kaine suggested. 

[problemsolver]

On 3/6/2023 at 2:46 PM, ItsOnePixel said:

This was only a temporary solution. I will try reinstalling windows to see if that works.

@ItsOnePixel Asking a (somewhat) rhetorical question:  did re-installing Windows work?

 

In case your curious what happened when you added the RAM originally, here's what happened:

• On first boot after you installed the additional two sticks or RAM, the computer ran memory training and for whatever reason it passed (likely temperature i.e. the CPU and all components were cool). So, the BIOS passed the hardware off to the OS to run all 4-sticks at 3600 MHz
  • But once it booted, the actual OS couldn't use the RAM at 3600 MHz because it was unstable, so you got BSODs
• Then, the computer tried memory training again when the system restarted (probably at the 3600 MHz you asked it to)
  • More BSODs
• Then after some number of BSODs, and the CPU and everything else being warm at this point, subsequent memory training failed at 3600 MHz at which point the BIOS set the RAM back at 2600 MHz (because the memory training @ 3600 MHz failed)

I will be very impressed if re-installing Windows fixes this issue