I had to buy 16GB ddr3 to replace 8gb I had in there previously that went bad, a few months ago.

Thankfully I could buy "AMD only ram" which was way cheaper than more generic ram 😁

doaks80 wrote:

Thankfully I could buy "AMD only ram" which was way cheaper than more generic ram 😁

Who? What?

Might I interest you in purchasing some freedom dollars? I assure you they're the free-est dollars you could ever invest in. If you prefer GOLD, I can help you there as well. PM me if you're interested. Your neighbors will be jealous. Trust me, bigly. You can count on me because I never lie, and I'm always right.

(Don't take off your shoes)

KT7AGuy wrote:

Who? What? […]
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doaks80 wrote:

Thankfully I could buy "AMD only ram" which was way cheaper than more generic ram 😁

Who? What?

Might I interest you in purchasing some freedom dollars? I assure you they're the free-est dollars you could ever invest in. If you prefer GOLD, I can help you there as well. PM me if you're interested. Your neighbors will be jealous. Trust me, bigly. You can count on me because I never lie, and I'm always right.

(Don't take off your shoes)

Really. Something about the number of ICs on each dimm...that generation of intel boards didn't support it. You can google it.

The only thing I remember like that is how some chipsets didn't like double-sided or single-sided --- one of the two. Around PIII/P4 era, I believe.

It is true there is "and only" ram because intel chipsets do not support some ic density configuration.... It's like we are back 20 years 🤣 🤣

I've downsized my collection of hardware and in testing 2 trays of ram (almost 100 sticks), i've thrown out maybe 30 sticks because they were defective. No other piece of hardware (including motherboards and video cards) has anything remotely near the failure rate of memory in my experience

keropi wrote:

It is true there is "and only" ram because intel chipsets do not support some ic density configuration.... It's like we are back 20 years 🤣 🤣

True, but terms like "AMD only" are worse than misleading. They only apply to a certain generation of chipset and even then obscure what is actually going on. Instead RAM vendors should just specifiy density & organization of their DIMMs. Not completely sure what's up now (which I why the term irritates me), but back in the day it was off-spec stuff with 16Mx4 and 32Mx4 16-chip single sided (electrically, the DIMMs frequently had chips on both physical sides, just for extra confusion) configuration that Intel memory controllers refused to work with, whereas Via's slutty 'we swallow everything - slowly' loved it.

Same with "low density" and "high density" RAM; there was a time 256Mb chips were "high density". A year later they were low density. Just give the actual density, much, much better.

Two sticks of mine died this year.

2GB DDR2 PC-4200 from Hynix
256MB SD-100 from Kingston

I have an Epox EP-8RDA3I that has the infamous C1 error from time to time. I tested 30 ram sticks on it. Good thing I didnt throw them as 90% of them work well with zero errors on my ECS K7VTA 3.0.

I really need to recap the Epox board. I could've dumped some nice Corsair DDR with LED action.

Before you discard old parts please check that you have tried evey possibility.

Mine has been year of failed power supplies. I think I have had 5 failed power supplies this year.

I have a stick of registered DDR2 memory that passes every memory check I've run on it, but which the computer BIOS says is faulty. ("Correctable error threshold exceeded"). Should I throw it out?

Errius wrote:

I have a stick of registered DDR2 memory that passes every memory check I've run on it, but which the computer BIOS says is faulty. ("Correctable error threshold exceeded"). Should I throw it out?

I would at least try it on another motherboard if possible.

I guess this is the RAM equivalent of a SMART warning.

Errius wrote:

I guess this is the RAM equivalent of a SMART warning.

Sort of. ECC ram does parity scrubs. If a stick of RAM is generating statistically abnormal parity failures, it's important to know about it.

SMART warnings are more for the magneto-mechanical side of things.

Have any of the soldering wizards out there tried replacing memory chips on a video card? Sometimes I wish I could harvest faster chips from fried cards and put them on slower cards for a speed boost. Or on the 64-bit cards that have 2-4 chips missing.

Now that I think about it, if a video card has a defective RAM chip, I wonder if it could still run with that part disabled. Maybe flash it with the BIOS from a 64-bit version that only used half the memory bus to begin with...

I've discovered that a few of my DDR1 RAM sticks were bad earlier this year. I don't remember the brands that well, but I know they were 512MB DIMMs. One of them was from my eMac which thankfully got a RAM upgrade at that time.

Make sure your RAM contacts are clean. I swab everything out of principal. I got a set of four matched 16MB SIMM on Ebay. They looked fine, but memtest would actually halt. Swabbed the edges, passed multiple times with no trouble.

My hardware always fails in waves. This year was hard drives, though I lost a couple Creative soundcards, including my AWE64, and a 125/133Mhz capable super Socket 7 motherboard.