Quote Originally Posted by sesdave View Post
What is your setup and BIOS settings. How long have u run orthios with current settings. If your memory is XMS rev2.1 same as mine it has promo chips and they dont clock much at all which may hold your CPU back 1:1 . If they are earlier the willbe microns and need more volts to go above ddr800. As you say it is probalbly BIOS settings causing spurious failures ..
Well, I didn't pull the BIOS settings but a strange crash at lunch and a post-mortem popup from Microsoft blaming my RAM made me run Memtest for the first time in months, and it locked up solid each time I ran it: once after 110 minutes, once after 7. This is the same setup that did Orthos (blend) for 2 hours on Saturday with no hitches.

So I dug around and checked those suspect BIOS settings and noticed that while I can find what I think is understandable documentation on 4-4-4-12, I can't find specific settings for the fifth parameter in the BIOS, "Write Recovery Time". I had it set at 4, but with no guidelines and no memory of what it had been in less crashy times, I bumped it up to 5 and ran Memtest again. No lockup for two passes over 40 minutes, so I reran Orthos (blend) and again got 2 good hours.

So I'll wait and look for more crashes, and maybe track why things went south. I had thought Orthos was a good strain, but some of the crap I pull, like copying >4GB files while doing 5 other high-CPU things, have shown this machine really wasn't ready for Prime Time...