[BUG] Error 41 after hardware changes

[tijnz0r 0]

Bug Report Form
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System Spec
Asus Z97 PRO Gamer mobo
Intel Core i5 4690K (stock speed)
8 GB ram (old)
24 GB ram (new)
Samsung 840 evo 256GB (old storage situation)
Samsung 840 evo 256GB + Toshiba 3 TB hdd (new storage situation)
AMD radeon r9 280x (crossfire, but crossfire turned off in catalyst, using 15.7, also occurs with 15.9.1)
Win10 pro x64

Steps to reproduce
Reinstall, play a bit, quit, try to start a stage after the first play session.

Your recent history of races 
Mostly rally

Which stage were you within the championship\custom event?
Any

What were you doing specifically when the crashed occurred?
Starting a rally stage

How long was your current session?
Short

Which graphics preset were you using?
High + Ultra textures

Patch known good: 0.7 with old hardware config
Problem appeared: 0.8 with new hardware config

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Hi, error 41 as we all know, but due to some changes in hardware and software appeared buggy.

So:
With old hardware situation (eg before addition of 2x8gb ram to existing 2x4gb and addition of a 3 tb hdd and catalyst 15.7 and patch 0.7) i have never during early access seen the error 41, however since this week, dirt rally is unplayable due to error 41 after one play session, only way to have a play session is reinstall.

Changes before unplayable (not sure about exact timeframe of issues popping up, so please consider them as a singular change):
-         0.8 came out
-         added 3 tb hdd
-         added 2 sticks of 8 gb each
-         Upgraded gfx driver to 15.9.1 beta (without memory leak)
-         Enabled client hyper-v (the ram and hdd were for a virtual lab environment)

After that, error 41 galore (also note that performance was seriously degraded, more on that later)

Since then i made the following rollbacks:
- removed 15.9.1 beta with cata install manager -> uninstall all drivers and installed 15.7 (no change)
- disabled client hyper-v (still error 41, but bad performance was fixed, known issue with amd cards?)

When it happens, i tried the following things:
validate local game cache: doesn't fix
reinstall: fixes for 1 playsession

I'm willing to do any and all tests necessary, even performing hardware changes (partial or full rollback, reinstalling win10 etc), but it would be best if you provide test steps, to maximize info gained for providing a permanent solution to the error 41 issue.
Thanks!

Kind regards,
Martijn Tromp
 
-Edit-
I might have solved the issue for my system.
Even though 2 sticks of RAM are rated for 1333mhz and 2 rated at 1600mhz and everything else is stable, i tried underclocking the memory to 1066 Mhz and for now (a few times of testing), the issue seems resolved. Will update in a day if it comes back or not.

[Superd00ps 0]

Some motherboards are very picky with ram,...always upgrade with the same make, model, type and rating of ram,...if possible. Running two different speeds of ram is not a good idea. However, you should be able to run all sticks at 1333 and tighten up the timings without losing performance. Also make sure all your drives are on the Intel ports :)

[tijnz0r 0]

Yep, so it seems :).
The problem seems to be gone consistently and i'm happy to see that i found a solution for myself, as i need my dope. For now i can just optimize timings by setting them just below failure in dirt rally. Even if i'm stuck in 1066 mhz, ram performance only marginally influences overall system performance.

Having said that, it might be interesting for the devs, that this error 41 issue could very well be related to slight instability of the system dirt rally runs on. On the settings that dirt rally fails, i could play a host of other games, as well use intensive operations in lightroom, run sql server workloads in VM and a lot of other things without a problem, however dirt rally seems to catch out a less than optimal ram configuration in a users system.

This also could be why it is not to reproducable at the studio, because of the strict use of quality controlled hardware, as one would expect in a game studio. The home user however might just use a less than optimal setup, because the parts were around cheaply.

[Superd00ps 0]

Test your memory using memtest86+ ,...test #5 will tell you right away if it's failing.
http://www.memtest86.com/
or
http://www.memtest.org/

I also find Realbench 2.41 video encoding and heavy multitasking benchmark will expose an unstable system or you can use the stress test (select your total ram).
http://rog.asus.com/downloads/

[tijnz0r 0]

Unfortunately, the issue has returned.

3 hours of memtest in stock settings 1 pass, 0 errors. So alas the memory timing hypothesis has been disproved.