Severe Memory Corruption over time. Is this just faulty RAM?

Hi All,

I bought and built a new PC from the ground up in November 2022 because I was getting frequent BSODs on my old rig. I thought this might just be natural wear and tear of the machine as my old rig was about 8 years old. However, once I had built the new rig I very quickly started to see the same memory corruption that I was seeing on the old rig, on the new rig too. The only component I kept from the old rig was a new SSD I had bought about a year prior. Every other component was brand new.

I ran Memtest 86 and failed the test, so after some troubleshooting I tried the obvious thing to just reinstall Windows and see if that would help at all. It did and I was able to pass Memtest 86 for around 3-4 weeks before the same issues started reoccurring.

Because of this I have been in a cycle of reinstalling Windows every month since I built my PC, but on my fresh install it did not fix the corruption this time and I am already running into BSODs despite having installed fresh today.

I have messed around with attempting to fix the corruptions with a combination of sfc /scannow and various dism /online /cleanup-image commands but from those I am now getting errors like code 5, code 14090 and code 1726.

I have also tried to identify if just one stick of RAM is to blame by running the rig with only one at a time, but both sticks lead to the same errors.

What can I do to fix this?

Please see the diagnostics folder for full details :)

Thanks for reading!

Two flaky RAM sticks is unlikely, so there must be a common denominator - which may well be the motherboard. Are you certain that the RAM is fully compatible with the motherboard (and BIOS version)? Is the RAM on the QVL for the motherboard for example? Is it overclocked? Is the CPU overclocked (or undervolted)?

If the RAM fails Memtest then it's a hardware problem and not a Windows problem. AFAIK Memtest doesn't access any drives at all, so I doubt it's the SSD.

ubuysa said:

Two flaky RAM sticks is unlikely, so there must be a common denominator - which may well be the motherboard. Are you certain that the RAM is fully compatible with the motherboard (and BIOS version)? Is the RAM on the QVL for the motherboard for example? Is it overclocked? Is the CPU overclocked (or undervolted)?

If the RAM fails Memtest then it's a hardware problem and not a Windows problem. AFAIK Memtest doesn't access any drives at all, so I doubt it's the SSD.

RAM is KF556C40BBK2-16 and is listed on the motherboard QVL. Nothing in the system is overclocked and I haven't messed with the power configuration so hoping it's not undervolted.