Shoutout to the tech who showed me a better way to test RAM

Had a stick go bad on a client's Dell last week in Austin, was about to run MemTest86 for an hour. The senior guy just said 'boot HCI MemTest off a USB, it finds bad sectors in 5 minutes flat.' Tried it, caught the error in under 3 minutes. Anyone else use that over the usual tools?

3 comments

3 Comments

craig.brian22d ago

Three years ago I would have bet money MemTest86 was the only way to go. Then I had a machine that kept blue screening but passed the standard test after two hours. A buddy from the shop said try HCI MemTest. Found a bad address in about 4 minutes. I still run MemTest86 for overnight burn-ins on new builds but for quick diagnostics HCI is my go to now. It just works.

coleman.christopher22d ago

My buddy in San Antonio had the same experience as @craig.brian with a Lenovo laptop, swapped to HCI MemTest and caught a bad sector in under two minutes. He hasn't used MemTest86 for quick jobs since.

maxhart18d ago

Has anyone looked at whether firmware settings could mess with how these tests run? I had a laptop where the UEFI quick boot thing was skipping parts of memory initialization, so MemTest86 looked fine but HCI caught stuff because it hammers the addresses differently. Took me forever to figure out, but turning off fast boot and memory remapping fixed it on that machine.