A couple of nights back my streaming PC got angry with me.
The first night it bluescreened once, but it rebooted and the show went on.
The second night, I think Obs crashed once and it bluescreened twice.
Initial thoughts were maybe it was a driver or something that I’d installed recently, but that seems less likely now. This morning I created a Memtest86 USB stick and booted into it. Not long after it started throwing memory errors, and 4 hours in it was pretty messy (see pic above).
Next step was to whip the RAM out and test it one stick at a time to see if there was any obvious fault with any single module (this machine as 4 x 8G sticks). BUT, the RAM was hot – almost too hot to touch – and that’s RAM with integrated heatsinks.
So the theory became one of heat.
Previously I’d been using this machine as a virtual machine host, and it had two 120mm fans circulating air. Since I moved the machine into my office I figured I’d disconnect the case fans to reduce the noise a bit since the machine wouldn’t be doing much. So I hooked those back up.
I tested each stick of RAM by itself for a bit over an hour (which was roughly two passes of Memtest86). Each one came back clean. …and cool. But I still had the side off the case too.
So now I’ve got all 4 sticks back in there, with the fans running, and the side back on. I’ll let it run overnight and see what gives in the morning.
UPDATE: It was still unhappy with all 4 sticks of RAM, so I yanked two out (so down to 16GB) and it’s been passing memory tests since.
