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Incompatible RAM killed MB?

O

OzzieGT

Senior member
Hey guys...I got some memory that wasn't advertised to be compatible with my 440 BX MB (I think it's the Asus BH6). I got it cheap, and I figured if it didn't work I would sell it, no big deal. Well, I tried it in my machine today. The MB didn't post. OK, I guess I'll just sell the RAM. However, now my MB won't post AT ALL! With the old RAM, without any RAM at all, it won't post. The cpu cooling fan doesn't come on either. It's very dead...:/ I mean, no beeps, no nothin. The peripherals come on, and my PCI ethernet card is getting power, therefore it's not the PS. So is it possible that using the wrong RAM could actually fry my motherboard?!?! That seems kind of absurd to me...

Sitting here with one dead motherboard,

Ozy 🙁
 
I don't think your RAM fried the board. Chances are you channelled some static current on the board and it fried the board? Did you ground yourself while doing the process? The best bet is remove everything from the casing and plug in everything one by one again. If it doesn't work, you might have a fried board or PSU.
 
Hmm...well, it looks like it could be an AGP problem? If I plug in my AGP vid card it doesn't work...if I unplug the vid card it works. Any ideas?

Ozy
 
Do you have another video card you could swap in? also, when it did work, was it with the newer ram you bought or your older ram?

[=ONE=]6 sic 6
 
The old RAM. If I put the new RAM, the CPU fans don't come even without anything plugged in to the MB. I'm going home today so I'll grab my old TNT2 AGP and see what happens with that....

Ozy
 
Oz,
I've seen a motherboard zapped by incompatible RAM. A friend bought a new mobo, CPU, and 32 MB of RAM back when SDRAM first came out. Everything worked fine with that first DIMM that we installed. About a month later he bought a 64 MB SDRAM DIMM,(different type), and I went over to his house to help him swap out components between several machines. We removed the 32 MB stick and installed the 64 MB stick, taking the necessary static precautions. It went through the first several seconds of the POST allright, and then locked up during the memory check. We powered down, reinstalled the original 32 MB stick and turned the power back on. It was totally dead. No POST, no fans, no power supply, nothing. I tried everything I could think of, but that motherboard was completely dead, as though the BIOS had been zapped. I still think that it was that RAM, not a static discharge.

If it seems to be AGP-related I'd check the bios settings. It's conceivable that some of the default settings may have been corrupted by that RAM.

ax57

 
I offer my 2 cents. You don't say what type of RAM you bought but the incompatibilty is usually an addressing issue. So, if you bought a 256meg stick it only shows as 128meg. The most likely problem is that the ram was not seated properly and smoked your mobo. It happens more often than you would think. Also be aware that some very old 168 pin memory are actually 5v not 3.3v.
 
Looks like I fried the AGP bus. A) with no vid card, it still doesn't beep. B) I tried another AGP card today and the same thing happened (fans didn't come on). I've tried resetting the CMOS. Time to upgrade this Celeron 300a. Oh well. 🙂

Thanks for the advice guys!

Ozy
 
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