PassMark MemTest86 Pro 10.0 Build 1000

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.

System requirements

x86 (32/64-bit) or ARM64 based hardware
UEFI platform firmware
Windows, Linux, or Mac OS
USB Flash Drive (>= 512MB capacity)

Version 10.0 (Build 1000) 30/Sep/2022

New Features
Added new experimental memory test as Test 14 [DMA test]. This test exercises the disk controller’s DMA hardware to perform memory access, bypassing the CPU. The motivation for this test came from discovering a defective RAM module that did not produce errors when accessed via the CPU, but failed when files were read from disk via DMA. As this test is experimental, it shall be disabled by default.
DIMM (Pro edition)/chip-level (Site Edition) error detection on limited number of hardware platforms. This includes mid-test error reporting, graphical UI summary report on test completion and per-DIMM/chip error count table in the HTML report.
Added new config file parameter, ‘CPUMAP’, to specify the DRAM chip labeling map. By default, DRAM chips are labeled consecutively starting from U0 (eg. U0, U1,…, U15)
Fixes/Enhancements
Log file name now includes the timestamp
Added new blacklist flag ‘DISABLE_CPUINFO’ for disabling CPU info collection
Fixed ‘MAXCPUS’ config file parameter not being applied
Fixed hammer test incorrectly running in single-sided mode in Free version
Fixed clock speed measurement failure for ARM chipsets due to cycle count register not being enabled
Fixed detection of MAC address used as unique ID for PXE boot
Added support for reporting IBECC errors
Fixed bug in reading ECC error count registers for various Intel/AMD Ryzen chipsets
Fixed reading ECC error status register for Intel Tiger Lake-H and Alder Lake chipsets
Fixed ECC detection on Intel Ice Lake-SP chipsets
Added ECC detection support for multi-socket Intel Ice Lake-SP chipsets
Fixed ECC support for Intel Rocket Lake chipset variant
Added ECC support for AMD Ryzen Zen 3 50h-5fh chipset
Fixed ECC support for AMD Ryzen Zen 2 chipsets with 2 memory channels
Fixed ECC error false positives on Intel Atom C2000 chipsets
Added support for retrieving Intel Ice Lake-SP CPU info
Added support for retrieving Intel Ice Lake-SP RAM SPD data
Added support for retrieving Intel Ice Lake-SP RAM temperature data
Added SMBus (SPD) support for Intel Alder Lake-P
Enable SMBus on Intel 801-based chipsets if disabled
Fixed detection of SPD modules on systems with > 8 SMBus controllers (eg. quad socket systems)
Fixed bug in mapping SPD module index to SMBIOS slot index
Fixed detection of SPD slot for systems with soldered and removable DIMMs
Fixed incorrect calculation of DDR5 transfer bandwidth
Fixed DDR5 memory type in SMBIOS not being correctly parsed
Fixed identification of data partition in USB flash drive
Create ‘Benchmark’ directory to store RAM benchmark results if it does not already exist
Updated blacklist