Here's my system specs:

CPU: AMD Phenom II 955 Black Edition
Mobo: ASUS M4A79XTD EVO
PSU: Ultra LSP750 750-Watt Power Supply
RAM: CORSAIR XMS3 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3
OS: Windows 7 Premium
GPU: ATI Radeon HD 5770 (currently out of machine and in RMA process)

My problems started when I was playing a game (TBG, to be exact >.> you guys owe me your help) that was in open beta. My video card drivers randomly crashed on me, but were able to reboot. After that, though, the computer would randomly crash on me while idling. Sometimes 5 minutes, sometimes 5 hours, but it would crash. The screen would display a random set of gray-ish colored bars, like so.



I did some research, and apparently a lot of people who had my model card and bought it around the same time as me ran into this problem. Some consulting on forums determined that the card was probably bad, so I sent it in to XFX (manufacturer) for RMA. That's in the mail right now. I did NOT, however, uninstall my drivers from the card (this may be important, you tell me when you know the whole story).

Now, I got a card to stand in, and it's some ATI Radeon X-something or other. Small little thing, and I'm only booting off of the device drivers since I don't want to bother installing any official drivers that may make conflicts. So, I'm using my comp, let it idle for a while, everything seems okay. But then I get another crash, this one giving me a genuine blue screen caused by a PFN_LIST_CORRUPT error. So, I google THIS one, and apparently it can be a RAM error. So, I burn a Memtest86+ cd and pop it in (booting outside of Windows mind you)...and I'm immediately bombarded with RAM errors. It's at around 2000 right now.

So, here is my question: are my RAM and video card both fried, only my RAM fried, or maybe the drivers that I left on my machine from the video card are causing my RAM to function incorrectly? Please help me with this.

It sounds like your Ram is bad if memtest is throwing errors, try and narrow down if its one or all of your chips by testing them individually.
as to whether this caused your other issues, there is no way to know until you get your card back, if you get it back and it didn't cost anything to RMA it then I wouldn't worry about it.

Interestingly enough, something like that happened to me while opening Freebuild >_>

Except I remember some greens and some moving stuffs. No problems since then though.

Well then I'm staying high clear of Freebuild for QUITE a while if it does this to people's systems...

And k, I'll just buy new RAM this weekend. It's cheap stuff, no biggie. I just hope that the card doesn't do it to me again...

FreeBuild doesn't do this to people's hardware. Bad drivers do this to people's hardware. And faulty RAM is likely a manufacturing issue, though I suppose you may also want to consider the possibility that your power supply is bad.

My guess is that FreeBuild just brought your existing problems to light. You may want to consider starting it in debug mode though, but i'm not sure how much help that will be if memtest is spitting errors at you.

It is quite likely I have problems, yeah. This laptop is ooollddd

Software doesn't break hardware - don't get your info from movies for cryin' out loud.



Try testing each stick one at a time first. Some times simply reseating it (removing and re-installing it) can fix the problem.

I think, given enough time and motivation, a talented programmer could write something for a specific piece of hardware that could force it to cause damage to itself.

This humors me.

Kind of not really. The only way I can think of would be to over-volt the CPU a rather extreme amount. A vast majority of motherboards don't let you increase the voltages beyond a certain threshold without flipping a jumper or setting a value in the bios to allow higher voltages.



Care to elaborate? Just to clarify, my statement is for the given context of modern PCs, not the world of micro-controllers.

Putting stipulations on your statement takes all the fun away