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I just had a (Ryzen) Win10 machine with what turned out to be a faulty (non-ECC) DDR4 module fail. The user complained of random reboots every few days. It took
by PeterStuer 4y ago
I just had a (Ryzen) Win10 machine with what turned out to be a faulty (non-ECC) DDR4 module fail. The user complained of random reboots every few days. It took me weeks to find the exact cause. Nothing in the logs was directly informative, and the machine passed all tests. Only a prolonged Memtest86 run found the problem.
- ksec 4y ago> It took me weeks to find the exact cause I guess people are too young to know this? But it was quite common in the old days to first check on faulty memory. And then it would be PSU, and Motherboard capacitor. Both are increasingly rare given how much improvement we have made over the past two decade. But faulty memory is still a thing.
- Terr_ 4y agoYeah, even today, the first thing I do with new memory is subject it to a few overnight tests when I'm not using the computer. The testing doesn't need much human interaction or babysitting, and if a problem is found it's usually the kind where you want to know ASAP so you can do an RMA/refund in a timely fashion.
- PeterStuer 4y agoAs usual reality is murky. Hardware checks including shorter memory tests were done, but this computer could not be on overnight. The prolonged test could be run when the user was out for a day. This wasn't a corporate machine but a private one. As always several OS software configuration and driver issues were incrementally discovered and rectified, and as the crashes only happened very infrequently there was always the (wrong) thought of 'this might have been the problem', only to be refuted several days to a week later. I'm not claiming I couldn't have done a better job on this one. Low frequency errors without a clear trace will always pose a challenge.