Failing RAM? In this economy?
Now to go beg to the RMA gods
f
this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2026
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F
F! That sucks. Time to mortgage your house.
i had to pronounce some ddr5 dead this morning. at least it was 'only' one 8gb stick, but it's in an omen prebuilt, out of warranty.
user's just a high school kid. gonna have to limp along with the remaining 8gb (not much for gaming then) or random crashes with 16gb until he or the parents can afford to replace it.
Linux? I've heard if you can identify the bad blocks (assuming it's just one group of bad blocks) you can tell the kernel to not use those. If you're technically inclined.
I ran this too on mine, I had the mode set to memmap. Badram is old, grub these days expects memmap.
There were a few areas but they were close enough, so this is what I ended with.
Blocks of 64K were enough to fix this.
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash memmap=64K\\\$0x3c8f0000,64K\\\$0x49068000,96K\\\$0xa24660000"
he has windows, but i'll mention the option to him next chance i get.
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RAM has lifetime warranties, typically. Send in an RMA request, after you isolate which sticks are bad, and get new ones.
Just mark those blocks as bad RAM and then the kernel will route around them.
Yeah looked into it but I'm gonna try and RMA them
Dude you are running DDR 4 Ram at 2134MHz and with 15 timings. The Timings are good but the frequenzy is shit. You want atleast 3000 MHz with modern Ryzen CPUs for their Virtual Memory Fabric. You can probably get equally good Ram for a few bucks because these sticks suck.
Unless you already lowerd the Frequenzy in that case RIP.
Yeah I lowered it to make sure that wasn't the problem
I'm not sure what you're talking about. DDR4 without XMP typically runs at 2133 or 2400mhz. It's probably best to run a mem test at the stock frequency.
If it’s not a large amount of bad RAM, there are tools to patch around it via EFI or kernel for many operating systems. It might get you by until you get new
had a 2x8 kit fail as well, thankfully I clocked it down from 3600 to 3200 and it passed the ~2 hour test.
perhaps relax the timings and/or increase voltage?
Timings are already base unfortunately as you can see 2134mhz
Gonna RMA them
Yeah. One of my sticks also failed, doesn't boot with it in. Only 16GB is just not enough. And because I bought from a random ebay shop, I don't have the original receipt.
Mine booted but would cause system instability.
I can get by with 16gb but hopefully I can RMA. GSkill is pretty good on RMA I've heard
I wonder what would actually happen if you ran three sticks (assuming only one is bad). Would it dual channel 16 GB and single channel the other 8 GB? Does anyone know?
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My laptop has some serious RAM reading errors. Sometimes the bad block gets mapped to VRAM and there is garbled 64x64 RGBA overlay on screen, otherwise programs or the kernel just crash. It is probably not actually the RAM, which I since upgraded, but a soldered-in chipset... It is rare enough (about 1x/day) to be usable though.
What motherboard is it? I had problems with a 4-stick ddr4 configuration recently and found out the mobo didn't have the same specs on all 4 slots 😅
F
I recently learned g. Skill had lifetime warranty. Not sure about others but worth a check
This little maneuver is gonna cost us about three hundred bucks.
Thankfully it's DDR4 so no. I originally bought 2x8gb in Oct 2024 for $35, now they are $135
Gonna try warranty tho
Used to be that all RAM had a lifetime warranty.... Not sure about today