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Comment on Imaging a Hard Drive with Non-ECC Memory – What Could Go Wrong?

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I've had a lot of really strange bugs and data loss with my current build (Ryzen with Gskill memory). After running a memtest for 24h i finally saw that two of the four ram sticks were faulty (two bit flips on each only rarely and on a specific test). The company changed them but now a year later without any issues I have another one that failed in exactly the same way. This is the last time I build a non-ECC system for myself.

My motherboard isn't rated for more than DDR4-3200 with my old cpu, a Ryzen 7 2700. I could set my memory's XMP profile up and run at DDR4-3466 and memtest would be stable for more than 24 hours but would error before 48. I backed off, DDR-3400, DDR4-3333, DDR4-3266... finally stable in memtest for 96 hours, boot into Windows and run Prime95 Blend workload, 3266 crashes in hours. I finally find a little note in my motherboard manual that older CPUs are limited to DDR4-3200. Set that speed, rock solid, I was even able to tighten the JEDEC timings with guidance from the second XMP profile for DDR4-3133.

Gigabyte really did mean DDR4-3200 was the limit for Pinnacle Ridge and older AMD cpus.

In my case I tried at 2666 and 3200 but they were still failing exactly at the same address.

Heard a similar story from a friend last week - a faulty RAM stick as well. I'm glad I bought a Threadripper with ECC instead (worth waiting for a Lenovo sale and buy RAM separately)

You might want to take a look at your PSU. That seems like a suspicious amount of RAM failure to me. How old is it and what model, if you don't mind me asking?

PSU is something I never cheap out on. Always pays for itself in the end. A bad PSU can kill your whole system.

5 years. and the current ram sticks (the 3 that work) can sustain a 3 day memtest with 0 errors (at 3600). They were all able to handle that when I received them back from warranty.

5 years could be getting up there if it's a mid range to low end PSU in terms of reliability. You might want to see if you find your PSU in this list:

https://cultists.network/140/psu-tier-list/

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