Originally Posted by my-demise

Okay, so about an hour or so ago I tried to turn my PC on only to find it wasn't working. Power and lights went on but LED's on RAM would take for ever to react and when they came on they would just sit there as though it was frozen.

After a much effort pulling out plugs, checking connections/wires for faults, examining the mother board for any sign of a short, ect.
I came to the conclusion that ONE of my RAM sticks was to blame for this inconvenience. ARGGH!

Just wondering whether I am able to RMA this one stick and if I can would it be worth my while?

Overclockage had been applied to the RAM prior to this incident but I have a feeling that it is not to blame. Is there anyway I can find out what happened and maybe even get this poor RAM stick working again?

Thanks!

Originally Posted by coffeejunky

Sounds like you may need to RMA them. Although it *may* be the mobo. Do you have any other RAM you could try. Does the bad RAM work at lower speeds.
If you have to RMA you must RMA both sticks and IMO it would definatly be wirth your while.

Originally Posted by my-demise

Hey coffeejunky, thanks a lot for your reply!
+rep

Initially during my tests with both sticks in I couldn't get the PC to boot. So i tried again one stick at a time to find that I could boot off one of the sticks of RAM and not the other.

Now something really weird has happened as it appears that both are working again.

After posting this thread I decided to give it another go. I opened up my case and placed the second stick of RAM back into my system and hit the power to find that the machine booted perfect. And after setting the BIOS back up I managed to get into Windows without a problem.
I am happy that it's all up and running again as my sig rig shows! But I am afraid that if I keep running this *faulty?* stick I could run into more problems down the track.

What are your thoughts?

Originally Posted by Fusion Racing

Sounds like a usual Ballistix fault... exactly the same as me and a The Fury had. The ram will die, then if the pc is left off for a bit it works fine again for a while. RMA them, unless you can get your money back and buy some different ram as its not really worth bothering to try and find some which work. Between me and Fury we have had 4 sets die, so to be honest you are better off trying to get some different ram.

Coffeejunky - they may be double sided, but the new ones aren't, and they are the ones that don't really work. I have a set of double sided which still work fine. Easiest way to tell which one you have is by how many lights are on the top of the ram. If it has 2 rows then you have double sided, if it has 1 row it is single sided.

Originally Posted by coffeejunky

Ballistix RAM is known to start to fail intermittantly, But I believe Tracers are double sided, so should take alot before they fail. More likely is that it may just have come loose or got a bad contact (chip creep). I would give it a week or so and if things start going weird I would try an RMA.

Originally Posted by Fusion Racing

Sounds like a usual Ballistix fault... exactly the same as me and a The Fury had. The ram will die, then if the pc is left off for a bit it works fine again for a while. RMA them, unless you can get your money back and buy some different ram as its not really worth bothering to try and find some which work. Between me and Fury we have had 4 sets die, so to be honest you are better off trying to get some different ram.

Coffeejunky - they may be double sided, but the new ones aren't, and they are the ones that don't really work. I have a set of double sided which still work fine. Easiest way to tell which one you have is by how many lights are on the top of the ram. If it has 2 rows then you have double sided, if it has 1 row it is single sided.

Originally Posted by my-demise

Okay! Well as I said I put the *faulty* stick back in just then and it works fine. I will give it a few weeks and see what happens.
I've made note as to which of the two it is that caused the issues this time around so it will be interesting to see whether it's going to be a problem in the future.



Okay then. Wow, I and purchased this RAM thinking that it was really good! Hmmmm how wrong was I? Lol! No I wouldn't say the RAM is bad at all. I've had this set for about 6 months or more now and haven't had a problem up until now.

Basically I guess what I'll do is hold on for a bit and buy a whole new kit some time soon. An upgrade to 4 gigs also may be a good move.

**Something I had noticed about the stick in perticular that was causing my system to refuse to boot was that the thermal tape holding the heatspreader onto the RAM had came loose. Now one side isnt making propper contact with the chips. Could this of caused the problem?