Burning in RAM?

[st0nedpenguin]

Righty, I have read a lot on here about burning in components, and while the jury is still out on CPU's, it seems that the general consensus is that it does work for RAM.

Last night I bumped the RAM voltage up to 2.9v in the BIOS (2.96 actual), and started my first attempt at burning in my RAM.

I'm currently running the beta version of Prime95, using the bottom torture test option, the one that says it will use lots of RAM, and I have 4.1Mb free and have done for the last 15 hours, so I think it's telling the truth.

Is this a good way to burn in my RAM, and are there any others I should try?

Also, should I see any gains from this, and how long should I leave it burning in?

[Ulfar]

well... i would think that u want 0 ram free to get the maximum burnage.

[st0nedpenguin]

Yeah, but finding something to use every last Mb of RAM isn't exactly the easiest thing in the world.

[saaya]

memtest?

[st0nedpenguin]

I thought of Memtest, but it seems to cycle through the RAM whereas this Prime95 test is just hitting it all at the same time, I might go for alternating loops of the two though.

[saaya]

try two prime benches running simultaneously, a lot of people do that. maybe memtest as well, so your stressing all the memeory and at the same time it gets checked for errors :)

[SAE]

Memtest for windows :D

Uses max of available ram. Or memtest dos, but I do not know if it is reliable and intense enough burn in :rolleyes:
I DO NOT rely on it.

[st0nedpenguin]

Ah, cheers guys, I didn't realise there was a memtest for Windows, I'll give that a shot, probably with a couple of Prime95 instances as well, give the RAM a decent workout.

[saaya]

memtest and prime are both designed to stress your memory to the limit, if you use both you can be sure its under load :D

[st0nedpenguin]

So how long should I be burning it in at?

I got the impression that a few weeks seems to be a decent figure, seeing as though I have finally got used to sleeping with my machine on I'll probably just leave it ticking over 24/7, as long as I'm not using it.

Good job I swapped out the fan on the Northpole I think!

:D

[sjohnson]

Applying a little audio burnin principle to memory - both make use of capacitors that condition under load:

Audio burnin can take days to weeks depending on the components.

I can tell you this - it took a month of burnin before my Samsung Original PC2700 *DTL* would run 200 without errors in memtest or prime. The sticks wouldn't even do 166 FSB without errors when new.

[st0nedpenguin]

Yeah, the whole audio thing was the reason I still reckon burnin gin should have some merit for CPU's.

I'll leave these new sticks burning in for a couple of weeks and then see if I can crank 'em back up to 240MHz for a bit of benching, stability at 11-2-2-2 would be nice too. :D