Ram no longer fully being recognized.

Hey guys,

I'm having some ram issues. Over the course of setup and installing different kexts I've noticed that my 32 gb (8x4) DDR3 has sometimes shown up as 32 gb after booting up and other times 24. After troubleshooting audio and other setup features, it's now stuck at 24.

Bios shows all 32 gb running and accounted for however.

I'm also getting random freezes quite frequently and every other time I reboot my machine, bios tries to boot up and crashes on a blue loading screen, restarts on its own, then boots up properly.

This wasn't happening until the past day or two so I'm wondering if it could be kext related or if it's a hardware issue.

I tried every possible configuration beyond my original that was the manufacturer's recommendation for the 4 cards and the 8 slots on the motherboard, but no matter what 8gb is left unaccounted for.

Can anyone assist me with how to troubleshoot between hardware, bios, and possible software issues to find the root of the problem?

Please let me know if any supplemental system info is needed beyond my profile.

motherboard: GA-X79-UP4
ram: Crucial Ballistix 32 gb DDR 3
cpu: Intel i7 4930


Thanks,
John

Download and run memtest+ for at least 2 passes.

Ok, ran memorytest and got back a lot of errors. I left it running for about 3 hours and this is where it stopped. It seems like L4 cache isn't being recognized. In addition to the test results, I've added several pics:

bios M.I.T. showing 32 gb installed
bios blue screen freeze (happens about 50% of the time, restarts itself, then boots up properly)
Chameleon not recognizing 4 gb of ram
OSX not recognizing 4 gb of ram
an image of the ram connected to my motherboard.

Thanks,
John

one of your ram sticks is most likely bad

I tried reducing my ram to just 2 sticks and swapped them out one by one. I got different results. Either kernel panics or OS would boot up but all the apps would freeze after a few minutes.

Out of the 4 sticks, there was never a combination of 2 that would keep the OS from eventually freezing.

I've ordered replacement memory to see if that will fix it, but beyond that, do these issues sound memory related or is there perhaps another variable affecting it? How would I rule out that it's not the motherboard?

Thank,
John

Bought new ram. Everything fixed. Good to know it was just that. Bad to know that it was the 5th time in the past decade that I've bought bad ram...