i7 950 Failing IntelBurnTest at Stock Speeds!

[penskyc]

Hi Everyone, So I decided I wanted to try to learn about overclocking and doing everything the right way, I followed a guide on here that just told me to put some settings in, I have been using that for a couple of months now (passed IBT 20+ times), but decided I wanted to learn what I am doing and do it myself. I started to follow this 3 step guide http://www.techreaction.net/2010/09/07/3-step-overclocking-guide-bloomfield-and-gulftown/3/ I am understanding everything and it makes sense, the only problem is, IntelBurnTest now seems to fail on me almost no matter what, following the guide I severely underclocked my system to a 2.25ghz (normally 3.06), ran intelburntest and failed, even though I was severely underclocked, I thought it possibly could have been something with the Blck black holes thing, so I went up to 155 blck (15x multiplier) and same thing, I than went back to stock, and could not even pass on stock. I ran Prime for 10+ and it passed and ran OCCT Linpack for an hour and it passed evenr an memtest for about 2 hours (3 passes), only thing i cannot get ti pass is Intel Burn Test, even at stock settings, everything set to auto etc. Does Anyone have any ideas?!

Also went back to my 3.65 successful overclocking setting in the past and even that is failing!

Of course I am talking about Very High or higher, on standard I pass no problem..

GA-X58A-UD3R
i7 950 3.06
8gb x Patriot Sector 5 DDR3-1333
Corsair H70
Zallman 850w PSU
Gigabyte ATI Radeon HD 5770 Silent Cell

 

[humph]

Am wondering if it might be that you need to bump memory voltage up a bit since you have 8GB installed. You didn't mention whether you have some overclock on memory, but even if you don't, perhaps the extra memory load (4 sticks, running dual channel mode?) is where to look?

 

[justr]

Two suggestions:

1. With IBT, manually set the memory use at MAX and the number of cores to whatever number of logical cores you have... which is 8 with an i7-950 (each core has two logical/virtual cores).

2. There are a few resources online for figuring out what kind of BSOD codes get spit out... try to look at the last few digits of your BSOD codes (if it's failing in that way) and check to see if that gives you an idea about what to tinker with.

 

[penskyc]

I will try all these suggestions unfortunately as of today I am house sitting until sunday, thought about bringing my desktop but decided it was to much.. and just stuck with the laptop. too bad the only thing i cannot access remotely is the bios

@humph my memory is not overlcocked infact it is running at 1066 according to my bios, If i set the xmp profile to the one that is in there, (i am guessing the ram puts it there) than it goes to 1333 which is what it should be, but I will try to up the memory voltage. but still it is stock and at one point it passed, I have had 8gb from the start, so why i would have to do this now doesnt make sense to me, it seems to just fail on the last loop of 5 on very high with stock settings... any overclock it will just find inconsistencies once the second loop is done. I should mention that it doesn'nt ever seem to abrubtly fail the test it always finishes and than the numbers arent the same in the right column and it says it is not stable.

@justruss Well I have never gottena BSOD on this machine before so that is not an issue like i said above, it seems to complete the test just the numbers dont match up i guess

anyway will try all this once i get home on sunday

 

[penskyc]

Ok, So I have tried all the suggestions and I am still failing on Very High and Max. Leading me to believe it is bad ram. I took 2 of the 4 sticks out so I am running at 4gb right now, ran IBT on max 5 times and it passed leading me even further to believe it is ram, next I will take out these 2 sticks and put the other 2 one, if it fails I will than test each stick individually.. I have a triple channel board so I am thinking I am going to upgrade to 3 x 4gb sticks instead, but I want to make sure I can have a stable system and make sure its not the processor or board that is having an issue.

UPDATE: So as of now it looks like it is actually going to mass the 5 loop max test with these sticks aswell.. so it just has something to do with using 8gb of ram? I'm not understanding what the problem could be!

UPDATE 2: ok, installed all 4 sticks of ram, ran test on max, failed on the last pass (5th). reran and passed, so on stock i guess i am good.. so i am going to start overclocking from the start again.. must have just needed to move the ram around or something.

UPDATE 3: I restested with all 8gb and this time it failed on the second loop.. so what does this mean, sometimes it passes sometimes it doesnt, obviously it means it is not stable, but is it the amount of ram? the kind of ram? Again, i dont want to go spend 150 dollars on 12gb of ram and have the same problem.. I'd like to figure this all out before i start upgrading the computer again.

 

[bavman]

Ok first off, why do you have 4 sticks of ram installed? The i7-9xx series uses triple channel memory meaning you need a multiple of 3 sticks of ram. So you should be running 3, 6, 12, 16gb etc.

Take 1 stick out so your running 3 sticks @ 6 gbs

To test if there is a memory problem:
1) make sure you have all memory settings correct in bios which includes Vram, ram clock, and ram timings.
2) download memtest86 to a flashdrive and boot from it. It will run tests to ensure your ram is stable.