What is with my RAM? 256 turned to 128

[Dethoff]

I have a four year old Epox 8KHA+ MB which I have always run with two sticks of Crucial 256 2100 cl 2.5 DDR RAM. Lately it seemed to be a bit sluggish so I was poking around and noticed that only 384 system RAM was showing up instead of 512.

I yanked the sticks out and tried one at a time in various slots, and it seems one stick has gone bad and now registers as 128 MB instead of 256 MB.

I have never heard of this before. Is it common to have a stick go bad like this? Anything I can try other than to replace it? At this pont, I am not so sure that I want to invest in more RAM for this dated MB.

 

[Killrose]

Be happy it works at all. But however if you ran memtest86 on it, it would probably be full of errors. You might want to try to test it before you corrupt your system.

 

[ChiPCGuy]

Originally posted by: Dethoff
I have a four year old Epox 8KHA+ MB which I have always run with two sticks of Crucial 256 2100 cl 2.5 DDR RAM. Lately it seemed to be a bit sluggish so I was poking around and noticed that only 384 system RAM was showing up instead of 512.

I yanked the sticks out and tried one at a time in various slots, and it seems one stick has gone bad and now registers as 128 MB instead of 256 MB.

I have never heard of this before. Is it common to have a stick go bad like this? Anything I can try other than to replace it? At this pont, I am not so sure that I want to invest in more RAM for this dated MB.

It is not terribly uncommon. Happened to me just recently on a customer's build that had been in operation for nearly a year. When built, the system passed MemTest86 about 25 times, and then SnM Burn, and then SuperPI. All was well, until two weeks ago. Go figure. Buy another stick, or time to upgrade.

 

[Dethoff]

 

[Dethoff]

Be happy it works at all. But however if you ran memtest86 on it, it would probably be full of errors. You might want to try to test it before you corrupt your system.

Ran memtest386 on it overnight and found no errors. Still, I am a bit nervous as to whether the bad stick will soon fail.