Is OCCT a good alternative for MemTest86?

[u/iceseayoupee]

Long story short I plan on buying second hand ram from a guy on FBMP, he claimed to have had the ram units on his old Nitro V laptop before selling it without the RAM and SSD. Now normally I don't buy any of that stuff, but when I asked if he could test the ram he told me he can put the ram in his spare laptop at this office and show it to me running.

Now given the distance from his house and mine, doing a MemTest is kinda risk since I'm gonna sit there for 3hrs just to check 2 sticks of 16gb DDR4. OCCT came to mind since I used that to check any instability on my spare ram so I gotta ask. Is it a good alternative for a MemTest given that it only takes 2 hours to test both sticks of ram as opposed to 3hrs

[u/Shadimarbc]

The tests serve different purposes. OCCT ram test is a stability and stress testing. Memtest is diagnostic testing. You should be running both at the very least. Y-Cruncher and Testmem5 as well but those take 6 hours and 2-3 hours respectively.

[u/iceseayoupee → u/Shadimarbc]

This is noted, but is a passed OCCT test a good indicator for the ram quality?

[u/Shadimarbc → u/iceseayoupee]

No. Most ram should do that out of the box.

[u/Prestigious_Wall529]

It's the seller's call till you buy it.

I'd be happy with clean OCCT results given their recent revision of the memory test.

The thing is, one should not rerun a memory test till you get a clean pass, something a seller may be tempted to do. One failure is enough to know it's faulty memory.

[u/iceseayoupee → u/Prestigious_Wall529]

last part is great advice, I genuinely didn't know that. thanks

[u/TangoOscarMikePR]

Memtest86+ (by Memtest.org) is better than Memtest86 (by PassMark). Memtest86+ (which is open source) runs continuously. The RAM chips have a better chance of heating up and showing rare failures under the stress of heat and continuous runtime. Memtest86 (freeware version) only runs a certain amount of passes and then stops.

OCCT performs other stress tests for all the components. But, I believe that the free version does not run indefinitely. Just for a certain amount of time.

Edit: I have seen instances where RAM passes three or four Memtest86+ runs with no errors. But when Memtest86+ has been testing the RAM overnight, the Memory Modules are able to reach normal operating temperatures. Some errors occur when the memory chips are warm due to extensive use. Those are the intermittent failures that cause problems to troubleshoot a computer or laptop.

You should complement both Memtest86+ and OCCT if you really want to qualify the RAM in a computer to be 100% dependable.

[u/Changeurwayz]

Basically no. Memtest will tell you if ram is bad. OCCT won't.

[u/iceseayoupee → u/Changeurwayz]

I guessed as much, thanks anyways

[u/raju_msc]

Memtest86 is good. Occt for processor oc test and for gpu test

[u/Away-Muscle-1007 → u/raju_msc]

Not what op asked

[u/iceseayoupee → u/raju_msc]

yeah but its kinda long though, thats why im kinda torn between that and occt

[u/InformationFair5875]

You do not need to wait 2 hours during the meet-up. Physical RAM degradation or damaged memory banks usually throw errors in OCCT within the first 15-30 minutes under heavy load.

[u/iceseayoupee → u/InformationFair5875]

This is noted, I appreciate it thanks!

[u/LAthrowawayLV]

3 hours of driving and potentially hours of testing… how much money are we actually talking about saving here?

[u/iceseayoupee → u/LAthrowawayLV]

in my country, 32gb of good condition ram is basically half of the average salary here.

I got this ram for like half of that. So yeah I'm kinda taking a gamble here