Short story time, then on to my recent modern hardware buy.
So about.. gosh, 4 years ago now, I spent (at the time) a lot of money buying an expensive ram set for my x58 system. I had a good job at the time and I wanted the best. So I read some reviews and the ram I had selected got good reviews but.. later proved to be the worst purchase in my life of computing.
What I bought: Mushkin Enhanced Blackline Ridgeback DDR3-2400 set, 6 x 4GB.
I had them with my old i7-920 + x58 system for a while. And they indeed clocked up to about 1700 Mhz, which was the extreme upper limits of the early i7 chip's memory controller. So then later I upgraded to a later-revision i7-980x chip in that system.. and the newer improved memory controller let it get up to 2400 mhz Triple channel ram. Which was nice.. but I had to phone mushkin support for help getting it to 2400. A CSR there told me to set it to 1.9v to do it. I was dubious.. but he assured me it would be fine.
10 months later.. woke up one day to BSOD, then the dreaded "burning electronics smell". Fearing fire.. shut off my system. Got inside.. sniffing here, sniffing there for the source. Finally removed the ram and smelled it and it rinked of burnt-electronics smell. Guess that tech was stupid. Sent all 6 sticks back for RMA, got replacement set. And when I put em back in, found out that it had also burnt out 2 of the ram slots on that motherboard.. which now only works with 4 instead of 6, reducing it to dual channel. I also ran it under-clocked at 1800 mhz @ 1.65v for the remainder of owning that system.
I continued using it like that for a long time, all the way out until I replaced that entire system with my new-to-me Asus P67 Sabertooth + I7-3770k system just 4 months ago from today. I had no indication anything was wrong so brought my mushkin ram set forward to the new system and after about a month of tweaking the new system.. I got it up to 2280 Mhz stable, running it at just 1.65v. The limits of the Ivy Bridge ram controller I'm guessing, possibly.
That worked fine for 2 and a half months... Daily, no problems. Ran CPU water cooled @ 4.8 ghz & Ram @ ddr3-2280, everything was happy, fast and awesome. Then about.. 9 days ago, a BSOD when playing games on this system one day, 0x0000007D error.. which I know is RAM. Ran it through memtest86+, 2 hours later.. came up clean no errors. I shrugged it off kept playing.. few days later, another BSOD. Same error.. another memtest scan.. still clean.. kept going. Then 3 days ago from today I woke up one day, flipped the switch and the system "Came on and ran" as in all the fans were on and spinning. It ran about.. 20 seconds then *poof* off, then came on again and would sit there "running" fans on and drives running but never showed video.
Diagnostic time.. removed all ram sticks to 1 stick, worked fine and happy. Passed benchmarks, some games, everything fine. Tried adding a second stick.. BSOD's again. But one stick for me was just 4GB, I can't do much with that. So I started testing the sticks individually.. all passed memtest86 one by one.. couldn't get any of em to pass in dual channel mode though, red errors. So I started dropping the ram speed back from 2280 and re-testing and finally found out this mushkin ram only works stable (now) at 1333 Mhz. And only with 2 sticks of ram installed. It fails to POST at all with 4 installed, and crashes and locks up and BSOD's with 3 installed, even at 1333 Mhz... but just two runs fine.
So like 2 years ago.. this mushkin ram has yet again, degraded it's self over time and no longer will work at it's rated speed of 2400 mhz. I could RMA it but don't know if I want to bother anymore. They're just going to send me back another set of shit mushkin ram that will die in 2 years. I might just forget it and consider tossing it in the trash and consider it "lesson learned" and avoid mushkin in the future.
Well anyway, knowing this ram has already degraded it's self down from 2200 down to just 1333 mhz.. and expecting at this rate more than likely it will just fail outright any day now, I went ahead and blew all my money I had saved up and bought something I should of bought in the first place, this:
Kingston "SAVAGE" DDR3-2400 16GB set, 2 x 8GB. The first half of the limit of my motherboard.. a second set of this later would max it out. Brand new for $77 free shipping. My my how ddr3 prices have really hit rock bottom today! Kingston ram always has had a big reputation for working at it's rated speed (And usually even overclock past it a little bit). So I'm hopeful this kingston set will be a great fit for my high performance system. If it works out well I may consider buying a second set sooner rather than later and just max it out.
I don't know just yet if my 3770k actually can do 2400 mhz ram, or only 2280. I won't know until this ram gets here. There's a possibility that the Mushkin ram was already degraded from the 1.5 years use in my x58 980x system and it may have been the ram actually being bad that was keeping it from hitting 2400.
Time will tell.. looks like I have another month of tweaking and tuning my newest system this coming week to figure out how the new ram works.
EDIT: Just tried to turn it on now and my 3770k machine won't even come on and POST with this mushkin ram.. I even tried a cmos reset so everything was 100% bone-stock.. nada. Not even with 1 stick of ram in it. So.. joy. This machine's dead in the water now until new ram comes. 🙁 Guess this mushkin ram is totally dead finally.
