When I rebuilt my HTPC I used an AMD 780G motherboard (GIGABYTE GA-MA78G-DS3H), Athlon X2 4850e, and 2x2GB Crucial Ballistix DDR2 800.
Ever since then I've been getting a lot of errors, bluescreens crashes and it's been a real beast to track down the root cause. I think I've pinned it down to the Crucial ram. With both sticks in, memtest86 crashes before it completes (doesn't give a memory error, just can't finish). But each stick passes with flying colors by itself. This is replicated in the computer's performance. With both sticks in, it won't last more than 8 hours without some sort of blue screen crash. With only one stick in it runs for days at a time with no issues. But of course it's dog slow with only 1 GB of ram in Vista. The RAM I used is on the manufacturer's compatibility list<http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/FileList/MemorySupport/motherboard_memory_ga-ma78g-ds3h.pdf>for the motherboard and are running at their stock speed and timing (DDR2 800 and 4-4-4-12) as well as voltage. Looking through the reviews on Newegg<http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=20-146-565&SortField=0&SummaryType=0&Pagesize=100&SelectedRating=-1&PurchaseMark=&VideoOnlyMark=False&Keywords=&Page=>there seems to be a lot of reports of faulty sticks, sticks dying after short periods of time and general quality issues. My question is, could this be something else causing the problems? Should I return both for replacement to Crucial? Just one? Will they even accept it when there doesn't appear to be any defects with the RAM? Or should I just cut my losses and get some Geil? ---- Brian
