Windows/Hardware issue - RAM maxed out in a few hours

Hi! I've been having a weird issue with my pc for the last month or so.. My RAM keeps maxing out in 2 to 6 hours of me turning it on.. I have 16GB of 2666Mhz RAM and I try to keep it running as few programs as possible (also disabled pretty much every program thats autostarts at boot) so something exactly like this doesn't happen..

According to the task manager it just fills up the ram slowly and hardly ever lets any of the data get out of the memory. As of writing this i'm currently using 80% (12.8GB) of the RAM and the only few programs I can see taking up any memory is Firefox at 1.2GB and the system process at 600MB while the rest of the system is just small 5-20MB processes.. Not nearly enough to take up the remaining 11GB of RAM..

My specs are:
Asus Z170 Pro Gaming Mobo
Intel i5-6600K (not currently overclocked)
16GB DDR4 2666MHz Corsair Vengence RAM
Asus GTX 760 DC2OC 2GB
120GB OCZ Agility3 SSD (Boot drive)
2TB WD Green HDD
1TB WD Blue HDD

Any help or knowledge of what way cause this issue would be very much appreciated! Thank you <3

And if there is anything I left out then please ask and I'll provide the information as soon as I can.. I'm gonna go sleep for now and I'll check in again tomorrow morning.. Goodnight! And thank you! <3

how many running processes have you got running?

which os? have you selected show all processes .

might be worth running a virus scan

Go get process explorer from sysinternals.

That should show you right away what's eating your ram.

This. Just opening task manager without showing all will only show you user processes or running apps, not system or background.

Also task manager won't let you know if you have a caching software using system RAM. I can confirm that Primo Cache does not appear in task manager when you have it set running a RAM Cache.

If you are running Windows 10, its possible it's a bug. There have been quite a few times where Windows 10 will just randomly peg 4 of my FX-9590 cores around 40-60% usage without any programs running in the background. I've looked in task manager and it's something to do with windows processes when it happens.

I've seen this, too. I think it's a portion of windows update, because it only happens when I'm not really using the system a whole bunch, then a couple hours later it wants me to restart. Can't tell for sure.

But I don't think that's what this issue is. I think it's either a program with a memory leak, or a piece of malware respawning itself over and over (I've seen malware spawn thousands of IE processes to send out spam and such) Only way to tell for sure is to check the running processes.

I'd agree more likely with the second part. Although technically speaking the adopters of Windows 10 are guinea pigs for Microsoft's code dev team. I wouldn't be surprised if its a bug with Windows.

How big is windows caching out RAM?

Seems like a caching error?? Is there even some type of malware that would cause this issue?? Defective ram?? Try live booting Ubuntu on the system and see if problem carries, run memtest see whats up. Never heard of this before.

I have heard often for this problem. 99% of the time it's software related.

ive just had a slow down on mine, just opened task manager and had 150 running porcesses a lot of them looked like comodo dragon when i organised by memory usage.

force closed dragon and my usage dropped and process amount is now down to 65.

its worth checking on the user tab if on win10

Try to boot into a live Linux distro of your choice and open and close up as much stuff as you can on it to try to fill the RAM ad see if the leak is due to software or could even be hardware.
An hardware problem sounds really weird to me anyway because if the OS in unable to access some data on the RAM you should get a BSOD, but it's not happening. A very bad hardware damage could be a defective memory controller on the CPU causing the issue.
To further test the hardware a Memtest86+ is always a good thing, with one memory stick at the time.
If the Windows task manager is not of any help scan the system with something like Malwarebytes or any other malware utility removal and hope that a stupid ass malware is giving you all of this headache. Good luck!

I run Windows 10 at the moment (I know I know.. I'm not happy about it either..) andi usually have around 60-80 processes running.. But it's all small stuff and I've checked every single one of them and nothing malicious seems to be running.

I'll definitely try this out when the RAM gets filled later tonight!

https://forum.teksyndicate.com/t/windows-hardware-issue-ram-maxed-out-in-a-few-hours/95764/5

I've tried running full system scans with both Kaspersky Total Security and Malwarebytes and it doesn't detect anything at all..

https://forum.teksyndicate.com/t/windows-hardware-issue-ram-maxed-out-in-a-few-hours/95764/11

I've only had a single BSOD on this pc since I built it a few months ago.. I've built a lot of PCs before and I'm pretty certain that i didn't break anything while assembling it.. But some of the hardware could of course have arrived defected.. Or maybe I actually did mess up somehow.. But I'll try running a memtest and see what it says! :D

But running a distro sounds like a good idea too.. Any distro you'd recommend with a lot of software pre installed to test with?

Sorry I've been a few days late on replying.. I've had a few router issues and I had a hard time figuring out what the fault was and fixing it.. But I'm back to try and figure this shit out! :P

http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

i prefer memtest86 for testing memory but prime95 after wouldnt hurt to stress test pc.

i had some defective memory so i rang corsair and as soon as i mentioned memtest they said they will email me an rma number so they do recognise it

I didn't want to say that you messed up the build somehow but I was saying that you got something DOA. Well I would run Fedora or Ubuntu. I don't know any other Linux distro loaded as this two are. Maybe make a little C++ code to fill up your RAM with some junk data just to test (I would've made myself the code for you but I'm the middle of the exams month right now so I'm really busy :/). No problem for the late reply, people can be busy and not have any spare time.

@shanky887614 Well Prime95 is more effective for raw CPU testing and lately has been pretty bugged out (can burn down an Haswell system). Use AIDA64 for testing using the 30-days trial, I think is more than enough time to figure out what's wrong hahaha

memtest86 is the main one to try though.

if you get an iso file download a tool called unetbooin

that tool is the easiest program i can think of to burn an iso to a usb drive and make it bootable

I'll take Ubuntu for a spin and try to write something in C++.. Even though I'm pretty rusty I'll give it a whirl :P I'll come back and tell ya'll how it goes after I get home from work tomorrow :D Oh and I ran memtest86 earlier today.. No errors, issues or problems at all? Really weird... Thanks for the help so far!

Disable everything you've installed from running. Then turn them on one at a time and see what's causing the memory leak.

No problem, if I can I give inputs and try to help. The C++ code can be rough around the edges, it doesen't matter. Good luck!