Re: MCE Errors, Bad CPU, Memory or Motherboard?

[Justin Piszcz <jpiszcz@lucidpixels.com>]

Thanks for this response.

On Sat, 11 Mar 2006, Marco Roeland wrote:

> On Friday March 10th 2006 Justin Piszcz wrote:
>
>> This is the first time I have seen an MCE error, googling the EIP value at
>> the time of the panic does not return any useful results.
>>
>> Does anyone know whether it is the CPU or MEMORY that is bad in this
>> machine?  As it shows some problems with BANK4; however, if the CPU is
>> bad, then it is possible to get all sorts of unpredictable results, right?
>
> If it's the memory you can try swapping RAM sticks or taking them out
> altogether, if you have more than one.
>
> Recently I saw these kind of MCE events also happen on a 3 year old
> Athlon 2000 machine, which was on 24/7. There it finally turned out that
> I ran an "athcool" program which enables powersaving mode on idle state.
> Although this saves energy and reduces the fan noise, switching back to
> work mode apparently wasn't fast enough anymore after these years. After
> disabling the powersaving the MCE errors were gone.
>
> The difference between these MCE's on memory or on the ACPI powersaving
> (if you use that at all) is really simple to diagnose: for memory they
> will occur on a very busy system, whereas the powersaving errors will
> occur on a completely idle system.
>
> But you might have real hardware problems of course. Then use the usual
> routines: memtest(86), check the cooling, power surges, etc.
> -- 
> Marco Roeland
>