4th install. Progressive increase of BSOD over time

Elderly Iron · 22 Sep 2016

Yes, it has been a while, and that entire while was more of the same frustration. HOWEVER, the issue is now SOLVED! My many thanks to all who tried to help.

The solution is, IF you have an Asus Z87 Deluxe motherboard, you MUST use ram cards from the recommended vendor list. Some may argue that ram is ram, but I will tell you that after almost 3 years of repeated failures while everything is "OK" by any testing methods, installing the EXACT cards from the RVL has cured the ills of this machine. What's even better is that I bought them used off Ebay at less than half the price of new!

In an unrelated conversation, I was told that running 4x4 for 16G or ram works better than 2x8 for 16G of ram, or even 1 card @ 32G. I decided to keep searching Ebay until I came up with a set of 4x4 cards on the RVL supplied in the Asus MB manual. Having found an exact match of corsairs, I was cautiously optimistic of their performance.

It's an amazing thing. It went from being unstable and slower than my XP machine to fulfilling my expectations of what this build was supposed to be! I edited the next series of YouTube videos without any issues whatsoever. (Part 1 is here, if you care to view! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYcQGR7IT88 )

Since I figure that the OS could possibly have issues because it was installed with the incompatible ram, I sit here at my XP machine while I'm loading drivers and programs (Or is that "Apps" now?) on to the editing machine.

I tried a copy of Win 7 Professional, which, contrary to most opinions, did indeed perform more stable than Home Premium did, but still BSOD'd on me and crashed occasionally. The new install is back to Home Premium, as I want to see how well it performs with the newly found solution.

At some point I may up my ram size, as I still have a wee bit a latency in the editing program, but it remains to be seen what will happen with the new OS install.

Again, my thanks to you all for your assistance in this endeavor!

Jeff Bradshaw
"Redneck Restoration's This Old Truck"

essenbe · 22 Sep 2016

Congratulations Jeff. Very well done. I know how frustrating the ordeal was. I have been through several myself. But, that just makes it feel better when you get it to where it should have been all along. Congratulations.

In the FWIW department, I talked to tech support at G Skill once. That stated the opposite about ram, and their explanation made sense to me. They state it is easier on the CPU if you run 2 X 8GB sticks than 4 X 4GB sticks. The Memory controller is in the CPU and has 2 channels. If you run 2 X 8 GB sticks in Dual Channel Mode (same color slots), you are only using one channel, which puts less strain on the CPU than it would if you were using both channels. Unless you were overclocking it pretty hard, I would suspect it would make very little difference though.

Edit: Good Video. That is well done too.