Can bad ram kill your mobo?

[xerocool]

I ask this question because my system is really buggy when I try to play games like UT2k4 or Lineage 2 or Warcraft 3, by buggy I mean it invariably freezes and the only recourse I have is a manual reboot.

I was debugging my hardware (swapping stuff out), and I found my ram to be really finicky, I have 2x 1GB mushkin pc2700 ram and when I tried only running my system with one of them, the system just crashed when booting up Windows, then suddenly my mobo died during one of the swaps. And I started swapping out parts with another computer (just to make sure my mobo was indeed dead, which it was).

After ordering a new mobo (Abit IC7-G), I was unable to install XP (the system crashed or hanged when booting from the CD). This kept going until I replaced my ram (I tried booting with just one 1GB stick, but I didn't even get a video signal and my keyboard locked up and even resetting did nothing) with an old 512MB pc2100, and now everything works just fine (albeit a bit slow).

I know this all sounds really strange and I didn't put alot of my debugging steps in here, but assuming my ram is bad (bad sectors, silicon is bad, etc) Can they have caused any damage to my IC7-G when I first tried installing XP?

Thanks!

 

[hjo3]

Unlikely that the RAM damaged the motherboard. But it is possible you coulda had some ESD while swapping and that could've messed it up.

 

[xerocool]

oh yeah, this is asked alot, but any good suggestions for ram brand?

i've heard corsair and kingston xms are tops (for gaming), but i'm also looking into ocz and geil.... but i haven't read too much about this yet.

 

[gunit]

Kingston value ram is good IMO. There is some deals on it on the deal page.