DRAM ECC error detected on the NB

From the past couple of days I am getting this annoying message continuously. Could anyone please tell me what this means and what I should do to fix this? I am using Opensuse 12.1

Message from syslogd@linux-hse7 at Jul 24 18:38:57 ...
 kernel:[  723.595032] [Hardware Error]: MC4_STATUS[-|CE|MiscV|-|AddrV|CECC]: 0x9c0240006b080813

Message from syslogd@linux-hse7 at Jul 24 18:38:57 ...
 kernel:[  723.595042] [Hardware Error]: Northbridge Error (node 0): DRAM ECC error detected on the NB.

Message from syslogd@linux-hse7 at Jul 24 18:38:57 ...
 kernel:[  723.595062] [Hardware Error]: cache level: L3/GEN, mem/io: MEM, mem-tx: RD, part-proc: SRC (no timeout)

Message from syslogd@linux-hse7 at Jul 24 18:38:57 ...
 kernel:[  723.605030] [Hardware Error]: MC4_STATUS[-|CE|MiscV|-|AddrV|CECC]: 0x9c0240006b080813

Solution 1:

the error message means that an error in your RAM was detected but it was corrected because you are using error-correcting RAM. if you're getting it a lot, then you have bad memory.

memtest won't detect it because the error is corrected before memtest reads that bad memory. if you want memtest to detect the error, you have to turn off ECC in your BIOS settings.