Weird RAMthing

Hardware and technical stuff
1

I’ve been having this strange problem with games lately. As in, they all crash. Out of the last five I’ve tried to play, four were pretty much unplayable. NOLF2, Chrome, The Matrix Online, and Far Cry all crashed within a couple of minutes of me loading them up.

NOLF2 would CTD a lot, and frequently not even make it past the ‘Loading’ screen before dropping to the desktop (no error message).

Chrome played great for the first three levels - and that’s a fantastic game, by the way, and the dialogue and cutscenes that Vladimir, Estragon, and Stanislaw created are hilarious - but on the fourth level, it started freezing or hard rebooting the machine within about fifteen seconds of play. The error log in the game directory would read "missing texture: ".

Far Cry would play for about fifteen seconds, then either hard reboot or freeze up, giving a 0xC0000005 access violation “The memory could not be written/read” error code.

The Matrix Online ran great, despite the dire warnings about how bad the framerate is, with one very peculiar exception: when I’d jump, the character animation would be silky-smooth, but the world would go to about 3 frames per second until I came back down. It was really strange. Oh, did I say it ran great? I meant it crashed/froze every time within about three minutes of playing. But it did look nice while it stayed on its feet.

So I tried a bunch of stuff: patched the games, rolled back the patches, uninstalled and reinstalled the games, updated audio/video/chipset drivers, rolled back the drivers, uninstalled and reinstalled the cards, changed audio and video settings in-game, changed desktop color depth, and even bought a new soundcard. All to no avail.

Finally, on a whim, I tried removing one of my sticks of RAM. I have a 512 in the first slot and a 1GB in the second, so I took out the 512. VOILA, I SAY! Worked great.

So I tried re-installing the 512 stick, but I swapped the slots - put the 1 GB into the first slot and the 512 in the second. Rock solid. No problems in any of the games.

If the stick of RAM is bad, shouldn’t it fuX0r everything no matter what slot it’s in?

It even fixed the weird thing in the Matrix Online, so now both the character animation and the surrounding world run at the same framerate when I jump. Very odd deal. Some days I think I should just play the PS2 only.

2

It depends what direction your system allocates memory from. If it starts at the bottom,
and the bad bits are at the end of the last stick, you might never know about a problem
until you actually use every bit of memory. When I say ‘bit’, I really do mean 1/8th of a
byte; it doesn’t take more badness than that to ruin your gaming ;)

I suggest you look into replacing that stick, anyway.

3

I would reccomened downloading a memchecker and testing the ram.

4

A possibility also is that your video card is overheating, and that when you shut down to switch out the RAM it cooled down enough to let you play games without crashing. If you can play for as long as you want though, then that’s not it.

5

Yeah, I just ran Chrome in that crashy level for about an hour with nary a hiccough, so anyway.

I think Evil I’s response makes sense… but I’m still boggled about that weirdness in the Matrix online. What would make it still work, but the character model moves very fluidly while the surrounding world herky-jerks its way to about two frames per second?

6

I thought that Weird RAMthing was the mortal enemy of Giant-Sized Man Thing.

7

I think Evil I’s response makes sense… but I’m still boggled about that weirdness in the Matrix online. What would make it still work, but the character model moves very fluidly while the surrounding world herky-jerks its way to about two frames per second?

I bolded the important part.

8

Matrix Online isn’t that bad a game, it just started out horribly. They need to change a few more things before I consider it again though (the marketplace blows, for example.)

They already fixed the ‘Escort missions through territories with bad guys 7 levels higher than you’ stuff. Holy hell that pissed me off.

Note that if your motherboard doesn’t secure your RAM properly, this could definately be the cause of the problem. I have an Abit AN7 thats picky like that…but I think only because of the cheap RAM I used.

9

You might run MemTest-86. http://www.memtest86.com/ I consider it one of those must have proggies.

10

^^^
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agrees