significance of RAM errors?

[Alan]

> Hi Dave,
>
> You should not get any errors?, the problem could be many things, but
> most likely hardware or timing related.
>
> There is an excellent README as part of the prime95 package
> (http://www.mersenne.org/), that should give you a starting point.
>
> memtest86 is great for finding problems, but it can take a long time.
> When you're "tuning" you need a faster method of determining if system
> is stable enough to warrant spending another 40 hours on memtest86,
> prime95 usually "indicates" memory problems within a few minutes - hope
> this helps.

Unless the problem is very rare, memtest86 will find problems very quickly.

I have rarely had a case where detection of a memory problem took more
than 5-15 minutes on anything modern.  (If it is an 5+ year old system it
could take longer, but those systems usually have less memory to begin
with so it all averages out.)

The advantage with memtest86 is it will give you the address where the
fault occurs to you can track down the specific bad SIMM.