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Sunday 1 September 2013

MemTest86 is a free, thorough, stand alone memory test for x86 architecture computers.

There are many good approaches for testing memory. However, many tests simply throw some patterns at memory without much thought or knowledge of memory architecture or how errors can best be detected. This works fine for hard memory failures but does little to find intermittent errors. BIOS based memory tests are useless for finding intermittent memory errors.

RAM chips consist of a large array of tightly packed memory cells, one for each bit of data. The vast majority of the intermittent failures are a result of interaction between these memory cells. Often writing a memory cell can cause one of the adjacent cells to be written with the same data. An effective memory test attempts to test for this condition. Therefore, an ideal strategy for testing memory would be the following:

Write a cell with a zero.
Write all of the adjacent cells with a one, one or more times.
Check that the first cell still has a zero.

It should be obvious that this strategy requires an exact knowledge of how the memory cells are laid out on the chip. In addition there are a never ending number of possible chip layouts for different chip types and manufacturers making this strategy impractical. However, there are testing algorithms that can approximate this ideal and MemTest86does just this.

Click here to find out more »

History

MemTest86 was originally developed by Chris Brady with a first release in 1994. However, some of the testing algorithms used have been under development since 1981 and have been previously implemented on Dec PDP-11, VAX-11/780 and Cray XMP architectures. Since then there has been more than a dozen new versions being released. Support for 64bit, new CPU types, symmetrical multiprocessors and many other features have been added during this period. In Feb 2013, PassMark Software took over the maintenance of the project from Chris. We have recently added an option to purchase a pre-made USB flash drive and also created a support forum where users can discuss issues. The MemTest86 code remains open source.