Before I had everything I picked up 2GB of Crucial Ballistix (at the beginning of March) and when I finally finished building out the Q9450/Asus Maximus Formula I threw them in. As previously mentioned the voltage on these seemed to run high even on stock speed of 800mHz which was some concern and especially after reading all the comments on the NewEgg review page for this memory. I chose it because of the good luck in the past I’ve had with Crucial but I wish I would have taken a look at the reviews first. Right now it stands at about 29% of the reviews on NewEgg give the memory a rating of 1. I don’t typically look very hard at reviews on NewEgg because the issues are typically a DOA module and people immediately rate the item a 1 when there’s always going to be a few bad apples in a batch. This is a different situation and most of the 1 ratings are modules that were fine and died 2 week (as the case for me) and up to 3 months. I dropped NewEgg a note that I personally think they should consider suspending the sale until Crucial gets some quality control in place and stops sending out garbage. Whether it falls on deaf ears or not, who knows but I RMA’d mine today since they do have a 90 day replacement at NewEgg for memory.

In the mean time I received my G.Skill 2x2GB modules which are posting at 1.97v and a ref voltage of 0.99, well below that of the Crucial.

My woes began on Friday. I really haven’t been active because of some house work that I’ve been completing and family stuff for the birthday and Mothers Day. I went to check my mail and the system was sitting at a message that it was unable to boot from the operating system. I rebooted to find that my RAID was failing so I did a hard reboot and the RAID was detected, booted into Windows and life seemed to be happy. I honestly don’t think I checked it again until Sunday and the system was locked and wasn’t responding to the monitor. Powering off/on did nothing on several attempts so I used the CMOS reset button, rebooted and dropped into BIOS and set the RAID and minor changes keeping it at stock “auto” for everything. I powered down/up and immediately saw a blue screen flash (need to disable the auto restart). The system came up from the blue screen and appeared OK but there was no audio, so I disabled/re-enabled the driver (which typically works) and it rebooted while making the change. On reboot it immediately gave me errors that my profile was corrupted and couldn’t load as well as several root files being corrupted. I attempted one more reboot and the same thing. I powered down and left it off until tonight thinking I would need to try the new RAM and rebuild (something I really didn’t want to do). I dropped the G.Skill in, rebooted and the system came up flawlessly with audio and all. I checked voltage and as I said it’s running well and I even bumped the system up to 380FSB and rebooted. I’m currently running 2 Folding@Home GPU2′s on my two 3870s and it’s been up for about 4 hours without a hiccup. We’ll see how it does overnight and into tomorrow night but even some of my temps and other voltage that I thought were a bit high seem to be a better range.

Unfortunately the North Bridge still is registering 50c at idle but seems to only jump to 61c while running the two F@H sessions. Still need to look into that or take a look at changing the voltage on the NB to see if I can get the temps down but my understanding is that concern is when it starts hitting around 70c in full load and I had read (need to find it) where it should be OK as high 90c but I’d rather not see it even reach 70c so I’ll just have to monitor it and see if changing the voltage helps or post some more messages.

Until then…