In your experience, ever had a motherboard kill a dimm?

[idreamsofram]

So I have this motherboard which I have had some problems with, in between relative months of stability. The chipset is an nvidia piece of garbage 780i SLI. The motherboard is p5n72-t .


The issue I am having is that over about 3 years, I have killed at least two pieces of ram in this board (1 of 2 sticks generates lots of mem test errors out of the blue after working fine for months). As in, the ram spontainously went bad. The first one that went bad during year 1 was OCZ crap, so I just blamed that.

However I recently purchased (year 3) a crucial 4gb kit to go from 4gb to 6gb and one of the modules spontaneously went bad after about 3 months of perfect use. aprox 2 years ago I replaced the power supply with a corsair 750watt, so I don't think its that.

Am I being paranoid? Has anyone had a motherboard that kills ram after some months in use? Its not a heat issue as the interior of the case is a cool 45*c with the cpu never going over 55*c under load. The chipset however gets up to 65*c (as measured with an infrared heat gun). Aprox 6 months after I purchased the board, the first PCIE slot failed and I rma'd it. Other than that and the few ram issues, the machine is pretty much rock solid for 3 years. I have never overclocked, and all ram runs at 1.8v 800mhz.

I know that ram in my experience anyways, very rarely just goes bad for no reason. The question is, could a motherboard malfunction be killing my ram? Should I just swap the motherboard before putting in the ram received back from RMA? I am typing this on the machine now, and it does work fine, with the ram currently installed. but for how long...

Just wondering about others professional experience or anecdotes with spontaneous dimm failure.

 

[J Macker]

I've never had that happen in 12 years of building.

 

[ljtatej]

Had an EVGA 680i that would eat ram left and right... finally ate the processor.

 

[MountainKing]

I've yet to see a RAM fail on me. Seen mobos, hdds, dvd burners, cpu fans crap out, graphics card die and God knows what else. I've yet to see a RAM module die on me

 

[BonzaiDuck]

My experience and understanding -- a little dated as it is -- would advise that RAM can have greater likelihood of "infant mortality," and some RAM models (specifically for your DDR2 with that 780i chipset) can fail after as much as six months. Particularly, some may remember that we had troubles with some Crucial kits -- like the Ballistix or Tracer. And at that time, the Egg was selling a "re-badged" Tracer kit as part of a promotion. I bought two of those kits, and they both fritzed on me over a year's time or so.

I personally wouldn't call the NVidia 780i chipset a "piece of garbage." I have an EVGA 780i mobo, and it was pretty good for that LGA 775 technology.

No doubt some of the predecessor 680i boards were a little hinky with RAM, but that created myths, and I've actually put the myths to rest with my old Striker board.

I can only say this -- after using Crucial kits for a while, I switched over to G.SKILL for both DDR2 and DDR3 needs, and my problems of dying RAM pretty much went away.

 

[idreamsofram]

Great thanks for the advice.

I thought that nvidia chipsets were so bad with so many problems that they stopped making chipsets entirely after that. I certainly replaced quite a few whoes chipsets had fried in one way or another. I thought it was like a solder issue, similar to what happened around the same time with their video cards (2xx series i believe). But anyways, it has been working for years more or less so I guess I shouldn't complain too much!

But yes I will give it one more chance before scrapping it. It was a $200 motherboard at the time, and i bought it specifically for the fact that it was well constructed, solid state caps, and lots of copper. I just remembered also that one of the two ethernet ports failed within the first few months too and has never worked again.

Suly, do make sure you always run memtest on a system you are troubleshooting. In my experience, bad ram has always been out there. Spontaneously bad ram doesn't happen too much, but it does occasionally happen.

Personally I only recommend and buy intel chipsets now, for intel cpus anyways.

Kind of like when its the nema power cord that is bad. Not too often, but every once and a while....