Severe crashes every couple of minutes - EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION

[Vacuumir]

Hi all,

I started with Planeshift, and I experienced severe crashes every couple of minutes.  I play Anarchy Online as well, had the same problem there. Mostly it is based on EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION and similar.

Turned off the audio, nothing. Then I run a memory test on my RAM with http://www.memtest86.com/ and it failed only on test 5 and test 8, at some adresses that looked like the upper ones (above 256MB). Figured there is somwething wrong with my RAM so tried a memory defragmenter http://www.bysoft.com/freeram.php - still no help.

Then I looked into my ram which the shop says is Kingston KHX3200/512 - which is a DDR400 Ram. Found Kingston here
http://www.ec.kingston.com/ecom/configurator/Parts.asp?KingPN=KHX3200&SearchType=KingPNFind&submit1=Search
obviously there are similar but not exactly the same part numbers. Notice that it gives a marking - 2-3-2-6 or 2-2-2-5 or the like. That is a notation for the RAM timing parameters. For DDR look here:

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/course/com3200/parent/NOTES/DDR.html

in short, the notation is

t_CL - t_RCD - t_RP - t_RAS
where
t_CL - CAS latency
t_RCD - Time for Ras to Cas Delay
t_RP - Time for Row Precharge
t_RAS - Precharge Delay / Time for activation / RAS Active Strobe /

and the numbers mean number of clocks (ticks).

Now, the thing is, I built the computer myself, and am not very knowledgeable. For two years I\'ve been working on my PC - coding and like - without no problems. Just the online games (which seem to eat a lot of RAM). So, I looked into the BIOS and realised that BIOS manages my RAM automatically (have a P4P800 board, don\'t know what BIOS). The setting in my bios is under Advanced menu and is called

Configure DRAM timing by SPD

When it is enabled - then the memory slot speeds are automatically managed. If you set it to disabled, you then get a menu with CAS Latency etc etc - everything above - so you have manual memory speed setup. Now, I noticed that the first setting for t_CL - t_RCD - t_RP - t_RAS right after the settign was set to disable was something like 2.5-8-3-6 or something strange (probably the one that BIOS automatically figured was correct, so it worked along with it). I just entered the 2-3-2-6 settings recommended by Kingston, ran memtest again and no failures whatsoever! Tried Planeshift - not a problem (still have the audio turned off though).

Well, maybe this helps someone,
cheers