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Comment by popotamonga | Hacker News Reader

Is that tool the same as windows memtest? My brand new pc randomly blue screens twice a month with 'corrupted structure' or something like that, i suspect of ram but windows tool said no errors found after a 3 hour test.

Cant even put it on warranty because it cant be reproduced easily. Cant afford to just start replacing components. 5000€ lemon.

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There are of course different kind of hardware errors and what appears to be bad memory might be due to some cells being defect or some less-than-perfect bus signals (which then should affect many addresses). In my (limited, perhaps dated) experience (I used it on maybe a few dozen computers), stressapptest (even using the default plain memory test), is much more efficient in finding hardware issues than memtest86+. If stressapptest doesn't find a problem in 30s, memtest86+ won't find any in 24h. I haven't bothered with memtest86+ in years anymore.

EDIT: only ever used the free memtest86+ tool, I have no experience with PassMark's MemTest86.

> some less-than-perfect bus signals

They are also responsible for some mysterious memory compatibility problems in PCs. All PC builders have this experience - on a certain motherboard model, some DIMMs work, some doesn't, but they are all off-the-shelf parts that follow JEDEC standards.

Often there are minor variations in electrical characteristics from DIMMs to DIMMs. If the signal integrity on the motherboard is marginal, there will be mysterious problems.

Try Linpack. It's probably the most stressful of anything I've ever seen, and also a very realistic workload (solving linear equations) --- machines used for scientific computing are doing that all the time. It will stress both the CPU and RAM.

(Many overclockers hate it and think it's "too extreme" because it causes their otherwise "stable" overclocks to instantly fail. I love it because it shows how an unstable system will sometimes effectively calculate 1+1=3. I don't consider a system stable unless it can pass a full day of Linpack without a single error.)

> Many overclockers hate it and think it's "too extreme" because it causes their otherwise "stable" overclocks to instantly fail.

I guess it's okay to game on a system that's right on the verge of failure; what's the worst that happens, your game crashes, maybe you corrupt a drive? Hopefully there's nothing important on it. But I like your regimen for more serious computing.

Memtest86+ (http://www.memtest.org) is what hardware enthusiasts use to troubleshoot memory issues despite the built-in Windows memory test being preinstalled and easier to access (no need to boot from a USB, etc) so I'm assuming it's much better than the Windows one.

FYI Last I tried memtest86+ (in June?), it had been outdated for quite some time and downright crashed on newer hardware. The non-free alternative called Memtest86 (by Passmark) works just as well if needed.

Nowadays I use memtest86 that supports UEFI. On Windows, "RAM Test" paidware works well.

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