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Ultra-X RAM Stress Test Pro
Mapping Memory Errors or "Bits and Pieces"
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(Review by MS, December 6, 2001)
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Some Considerations
I personally have used RST, RST Pro, MemTest86, DocMem in the past and there are a few differences. First of all, there is the pricetag. MemTest 86 is a free program, BCM Diagnostics is a 30day free trial. RST and RST-Pro are commercial products, where RST is software-based and can be run off a self-booting floppy and RST-Pro is a self-booting PCI card containing its own operating system.
The advantage of having a non-DOS or Windows based test program is quite simple. If an operating system is running, the area of memory containing the OS or reserved for the OS cannot be tested correctly. Usually, the workaround in a situation like this is to alternate DIMMs between two memory slots since the operating system will be loaded onto the higher (Win9x) or the lower number DIMM (all other operating systems). Thus, by switching DIMMs back and forth between slots, one DIMM can always be kept free of the OS which, then allows complete testing of the module. The natural drawback is that every DIMM has to be tested twice which can be rather time-consuming.
The alternative is to use one of the above mentioned non-memory resident self-booting utilities either from a floppy or else from an add-on card using the PCI interface.
Ultra-X RAM Stress Test Pro PCI card
The PCI card contains its own operating system as well as all programs used for benchmarking and error detection
At One Glance
The card shown above contains its own integrated core logic with embedded operating system as well as a variety of test patterns and utilities like CPU and memory benchmarks, PCI register editor (similar to WPCREDIT) and SPD Reader.
Installation
Installation is straightforward, just plug the card into a free PCI slot. The only issue is that the card can be plugged in both ways, that is with the labeled end towards the edge of the mainboard or else, pointing towards the center. In the latter case, pressing the power button will cause shorting of the power and ground and I/O controller, followed by thermal disintegration of the chip in conjunction with the nasty smell of burnt silicone. In more simple terms, the mainboard is toast, and so is the test card (talking from experience here, though not my own). If the card is installed correctly, which shouldn't be any problem, the system will POST and immediately bypass any other operating system to go into R.S.T mode without even disturbing an existing installation of an operating system. The beauty of this is that the card will either come and go without leaving a trail or else can be used on an isolated mainboard with no drives at all attached.
Options
RST-Pro will automatically start the memory burn-in test which is a low level stress test, meaning that it is not too challenging for any module. Aside from the actual memory test, though, RST Pro offers a few other things, including PCI register editing (similar to WPCREDIT) and memory and CPU benchmarks (Whetstones and Dhrystones). What we found, though was that ACPI functionality enabled in the BIOS caused the measured FPU performance to drop like a rock in most systems. Related to that, after running the CPU benchmark, the memory benchmark showed some strange behavior in that the 64 bit transfers showed only about 10% of their supposed bandwidth.
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Even though glitches always have something negative about them, these problems are actually negligible since a realistic assessment of the memory bandwidth can be recovered by a quick reboot that does not take more than a few seconds.
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