Are Bad RAM Chips Common?

A semi-Anonymous Coward asks: "I recently built myself a new system using a mainboard which required using registered DDR SDRAM -- the motherboard will not work with unbuffered / unregistered memory, and I wanted the extra integrity provided by registered memory anyway. To my amazement, both the memory I purchased with the board and one of two other sticks I purchased were either defective or simply incapable of working with the board (which is the Chaintech 7KDD, BTW). About how often do people run into defective memory, and do they see them from the 'reputable' manufacturers as often as they do the 'no-name' ones? Now that I've spent a ridiculous amount of money on this, I'm a lot more wary."

Comments

Never happened to me

[Descartes]

I don't buy ram very frequently but I have never run into bad ram, and I always buy the cheapest I can find.

My one encounter with "bad" ram was in a computer hardware class I took a few years ago. Two other classmates and myself were usually given special tasks by the professor because the class was so stupidly easy for us. One day, after we finished our two hour lab in fifteen minutes he gave us a stack of 8meg simms (this was a while ago) to test with some software he had. We tested about six and every time one or all of them came up as bad. Being 18 year old computer geeks we decided could keep the bad ram for keychains. The next week he told us to try the test with known good ram, and it turned out that the program was faulty not the ram. My fully functional $30 keychain has since fallen apart but I sometimes wonder if he every counted the ram in the closet at the end of the semester.

Re:Bad sockets?

[kidlinux]

I have two Abit KG7-raid motherboards, using Crucial registered pc2100 ddr memory, no problems at all.

You're right about the flexing though - only if you've not installed the motherboard correctly. I did this once. There's a screw mount near the ram slots that I overlooked, and if it's not there the motherboard will flex right down to the case's motherboard mounting plane. This being my first experience with an ATX power supply (ie: ones that aren't actually off when the computer is shut down, and have a manual power switch at the back), I didn't manually turn off the power or even unplug the cord (duh!) So when I pressed the ram in, my mobo flexed and shorted out on the case - huge sparks and all sorts of wonderful language and a dead motherboard (ram was perfectly fine though!) Lucky for me I managed to get the mobo replaced on warantee :)

Anyway, moral of the story is - install the motherboard properly and you won't have this "flexing" problem. Look for the screw mounting hole near the ram slots and make sure you put a mounting peg in there.