Ram Issues in About this Mac / 10.10.5

[YYR123]

So I have been generally happy for about 4 years or so with my setup, but now have some issues.

1. My BIOS shows all my RAM correct size and slots installed.

2. When booting to 10.10.5, and I look at ATM...it only shows 12gb instead of the 16Gb....

3. It also shows different slots than the actual mobo. So i have them installed in 1/2/3/4 but in ATM it shows them in 1/2/6/7

is one of my sticks dead?

I pulled out all the ram and ran just 4gb in slot 1....ATM shows it as installed in slot 6......

 

[EV.forever]

14GB is a strange number, what have you got in there that gets you that number? Are the DIMMs all the same brand/speed?

 

[YYR123]

whoops, yes it's supposed to be 16gb..... and all are a matched set. Corsair

sorry for that

I have downloaded the mem-test software that was mentioned in another sticky....so I will see if that clears anything up.....

 

[bmoag]

Bear with me:

On my Skylake machine (I am sure you are aware Skylake has its particular problems with El Capitan) with the .5 revision, which solved other issues, I noticed that with most cold boots (booting from off) the system reported half the RAM and too high a ram speed. When that happened certain programs, specifically Photoshop plugins, simply would not run. Hence not just a cosmetic problem as Photoshop is the only reason I have wrestled with Hackintosh since Snow Leopard.

This machine also boots into Win 10 where every hardware test passed.

On another website where someone else posted the same problem with El Capitan/Skylake the solution suggested, which works for me, was simply to reboot. I have no idea why but then everything is configured correctly and the machine is very stable, even emerging from sleep fully functional.

So I do not know if RAM configuration problems are specific to to the .5 revision, Skylake or something worse but it couldn't hurt to reboot and see what happens.

 

[YYR123]

awesome info bmoag.

I have rebooted many times, to no avail.......

I started to notice some issues with Finder acting weird....and that's what brought me around to looking into my system.

 

[EV.forever]

whoops, yes it's supposed to be 16gb..... and all are a matched set. Corsair

sorry for that

I have downloaded the mem-test software that was mentioned in another sticky....so I will see if that clears anything up.....

Ah, excellent, a matched set of Corsair. I use Corsair RAM myself. Yes definitely run the Memtest86+ software which is free and open source.

You can find an ISO file here that is burnable and will fit on a CD:
http://www.memtest.org/#downiso

One of the benefits of Memtest is that it reports SPD data and total RAM detected. I would let it run for 4 Passes at the bare minimum. At least that will rule out a hardware problem with the RAM itself.