Can bad RAM ruin other components?

[forkd]

I need some help here guys. This seems like it should be posted somewhere but I cannot find this topic. Sorry if it is a duplicate.

I bought a stick of the Fry's Mushkin 2100 512mb DDR and slapped into an ECS K7S5A, next to a Crucial 2100DDR 256MB stick, and after hours of operation I got a windows critical hardware failure BSOD etc. . I was intoxicated while installing it and therefore just tried to reboot and continue with my Half-Life rampage. The failures became more frequent and eventually I couldn't even post.

I purchased a new mobo/cpu combo and have been having "issues" since and have now realized that the RAM I purchased and the Crucial stick will not allow a system to POST. Therefore they are bad.

Question: When I mixed the RAM was that a bad thing? Could they have damaged other components like the mobo, cpu, gpu, etc? How do I check clean beer out of my hard drive...just kidding.

I have little to no knowledge about memory chips and their problems so please be nice and help me out a litle here because I don't want to find out that the RAM is just an effect and not the cause. Any help appreciated.

Thanks

 

[Jeff7]

Since the problems started when you put the new RAM in, I'd suspect it. Take the old stick out, leave the new one in, and run Memtest86 on the RAM.
Maybe the timings are set too fast in the BIOS, and the RAM can't handle it.

 

[forkd]

Thanks Jeff,

I've never seen anything like that before. I'll try to see if I can get it to post and run that.