Now I need to take a loan in order to afford 32gb for replacement thanks to the ai bros hoarding all the chips…
Tried on three different PCs, both Intel and AMD, both sticks are damaged, somehow
At least its DDR4?
Im grasping.
Bro I’ve had my ram for yeaaaars. Anytime my computer glitches I just think “yep it’s time” and my wallet sheds a tear
The universe: Fuck this guy in particular
On Linux you can mask out bad memory ranges. Don’t know about Windows.
That’s neat, I’ll definitely have a look about the topic.
If you haven’t yet, I would try disabling the XMPP/DOCP profile to see if that passes a test. This will tell you if the RAM is just dead or if it’s degraded a bit and can’t hit the same speeds as it did before. If it does pass, then re-enable that profile and try downclocking or loosening the timings a bit to see if that’ll work.
Failing that, you could try increasing the voltage slightly (like +0.05V, I wouldn’t go above 1.4V), but I’d be careful on this front to not cause anymore damage.
Sucks that this happened right now, but IMO it’d be better to sacrifice a slight hit in performance than to buy RAM by itself at these premiums.
RAM has Jabber stuff now? /s
This guy RAMs !
Someone else may have said this but try reseating the memory, making sure there isn’t dust or anything in the slots
Is this your board? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0Fh-VTAf3U
yes, and I agree with it being TOTAL TRASH
- it takes two boots to start, first boot can’t see any drives connected (sata, nvme). If you boot from usb some OS installer, the installer won’t see any drive until reboot.
- it has no support whatsoever. BIOS update? LOL you get the alpha “if it compiles, it ships” version
- the bios is in engineering mode and has like 15 pages of incomprehensible options
- even if the bios has 15 pages of ultradetailed engineer-only options, it’s missing basic options like “numlock on at start”, “WOL”, fan control, and other stuff that i forgot about (or maybe they’re buried somewhere under some weird acronym)
I have two sticks of RAM worth $850 now that went bad but I was able to successfully RMA them - can you do that?
Could be caused by a power surge maybe? Lighting strike? Just thinking out loud. How this could be happening if your ram stick was running fine for years.
Well luckily you’re on the right generation of Intel that allows you to use DDR4. It’ll probably be cheaper to buy a new motherboard than it would be to buy DDR5
They’re already on DDR4, according to the screenshot
The what’s the fucking problem? Just buy more RAM.
Even DDR4 went from ~50€/2x16gb module to 180€ - utterly insane

Could this possibly be caused by a bad connection of the ram contacts?
I’m grasping for ya.
If not… F
Is this a laptop ? Are you in the EU ? Is 2x8 Gb enough for your needs ?
Is this a laptop ?
I’m not OP, but an i7-11800H is a mobile processor, so while I’m sure that there are non-laptop PCs out there using laptop CPUs, I’d guess that it’s probably a laptop.
No it’s some kind of hybrid bastard mobo from AliExpress where they use a soldered mobile CPU but with desktop memory in microATX form factor
Ah too bad, I’d have sold you the RAM at a great discount (~50€)

I have an old team force ddr4 16gb kitm not exactly top of the line but should do the trick. I’ll gladly sell it to you for a much fairer price than what’s around these days long as you’re in the us. dm me if interested, no worries if not
Unless it’s ddr5 check your local ewaste recyclers, most have shops where you can buy used parts.
i wonder if it was the motherboard sending wrong voltage or something like that. What are the chances of TWO modules failing AT THE SAME TIME (although it’s the same kit, identical memory, so maybe it could be damaged silicon and i never noticed before)
Try and single out the cpu cache with cache less mode. 2 sticks is a weird issue if timing didn’t slip on the memory controller or overvoltage was applied.
Yeah two sticks at once to me says mobo issue, IF you tested each stick individually and they both failed separately. Maybe not fried, I’d be hesitant to try them in a better mobo to not fry a slot too, but they might still be fine.
Did you test each stick individually to confirm both are dead? If two sticks are in there and it fails all that means is “at least one failed”. That’s just an indicator to go one stick at a time to determine which one.
Maybe 1 is causing the other to fail?
Could try the sticks individually.It is strange that 2 sticks fail at the same time. It smells like a symptom instead of the root issue.
In fact they should try. Due to dual/quad mode the only thing testing multiple sticks at once will tell you is if any of the sticks have failed. Only going one by one will tell you which ones or how many, otherwise you’ll have red herrings
Yeh, the 16/32 in the screenshot and that 2 sticks are dead suggests they have 4x 8gb sticks, and lends credence that one channel is being messed with.
They said they tested the ram on multiple systems, but they might have just thrown both “dead” sticks in there at the same time - leading to a similar failure mode as they are both on the same channel.I bet 1 stick is dead, and they could probably get away with 24gb of ram in a 3/2 channel distribution
Agreed. Luckily with RAM, you know pretty quickly if a stick is dead. Yeah the test can run for hours, but in my experience if a stick is dead, memtest will go red almost immediately, most of the time not even making it 2 minutes.
Exactly my thoughts. Take your RAM and test it with another CPU + MoBo combo. Ask friends. I bet the RAM is good.
What kind of RAM? DDR4? I can sell you old G Skill DDR4.
Does the BIOS support any overclocking/tweaking?
I’m not familliar with Rocket Lake (your CPU generation), but you may be able to bump the voltage or loosen the timings a bit to get it stable. Even without BIOS support, it’s possible you could do this from your operating system, like you can with Ryzen.
Do they run stably if you downclock the memory in your BIOS? I’d at least try that first if replacing them is going to be a major problem.
No, even tried to run them at 1866…
Ah, fair enough. Long shot, but thought I’d at least mention it on the off chance that maybe it would work and maybe you hadn’t yet tried it. Sorry.
tries to think of anything else that could be done
Are you using Linux? Linux has a patch that was added many years back with the ability to map around damaged regions in memory. I mean, if your memory is completely hosed and you can’t even boot the kernel, then that won’t work, but if you can identify specific areas that fail, you can hand that off to the kernel and it can just avoid them. Obviously decreases usable memory by a certain amount, but…shrugs
I’ve never needed to do it myself, but let me go see if I can find some information. Think it was the “badram” feature.
searches
Okay. You’re running memtest86. It looks like that has the ability to generate the string you need, and you hand that off to GRUB, which hands it off to the kernel.
https://www.memtest86.com/blacklist-ram-badram-badmemorylist.html
MemTest86 Pro (v9 or later) supports automatic generation of BadRAM string patterns from detected errors in the HTML report, that can be used directly in the GRUB2 configuration without needing to manually calculate address/mask values by hand.
To enter the address ranges to blacklist manually, do the following:
Edit /etc/default/grub and add the following line:
GRUB_BADRAM=addr,mask[,addr,mask...]where the list of addr,mask pairs specify the memory range to block using address bit matching Eg. GRUB_BADRAM=0x7ddf0000,0xffffc000 shall exclude the memory range 0x7DDF0000-0x7DDF4000 Open and terminal and run the following command
sudo update-grubReboot the system
If you can’t even boot the system sufficiently to get
update-grubto run, then you might need to do a fancier dance (swap drive to another machine or something), but that’s probably a good first thing to try. I’d try booting to “rescue mode” or whatever if your distro has an option like that in GRUB, something that doesn’t start the graphical environment, as it’ll touch less memory.wow i’m running linux, so it might be perfect
though i’m a bit scared that it will get worse over time. Today i got a freeze that forced me to test the ram with memtest86, but since september i got some random corruption in the btrfs filesystem (luckily always “useless” files like flatpak or docker stuff that i could delete and download again in seconds) and i assumed it was a btrfs bug, not hardware problem
If I were in this position I’d strongly consider using 16GB for the next year or two. Especially with an NVME SSD, good swap performance makes the impact of running out of memory much smaller than it used to be.
It’s very strange both sticks failed at the same time, have you tried them in another motherboard?
You can even make linux run an automatic memtest on boot and reserve the bad areas it finds. This is with the memtest=N kernel parameter, where N is the number of passes. memtest=17 tests all patterns. With this, the kernel will run an automatic test on every boot.
I had to do this on my busted ddr4 2 weeks ago. Badram didn’t work, but memmap did. I had to do bit flipping to get the translation from BADRAM as explained here.
I think the latest memtest86+ has the option to report in memmap format. But you will need to take a photo of the screen, coz it’s Foss and not as fancy as Passmarks memtest.
Edit: Adding badram to grub broke grub for me, I have to undo the grub config using a live boot rescue thingamajig. Then I went hunting why.
doubt that there are a lot of systems with damaged memory floating around.
Let’s say that you would be surprised if we actually started checking this. I will not disclose my occupation but there are thousands of critical telco infrastructure pieces of equipment that run not only a non-ECC ram because of cost cutting, but with actually broken DRAM modules, regularly rebooting at least a few times a day and causing local outages…
Back to the topic at hand - doesn’t it seem strange that only CPU4 finds issues in memtest86? It could be a CPU or even motherboard that got damaged and not the DRAM itself, no?
Back to the topic at hand - doesn’t it seem strange that only CPU4 finds issues in memtest86? It could be a CPU or even motherboard that got damaged and not the DRAM itself, no?
I noticed that, but OP said that he ran the thing in three different systems, so I’m assuming that he’s seen the same problems with multiple CPUs. It may be — I don’t know — that memtest86 doesn’t, at least as he’s running it, necessarily try to hit each byte of memory with each CPU, or at least that the order it does so doesn’t have errors from other CPUs visible.
I also wondered if it might be a 13th or 14th gen Intel CPU, the ones that destroyed themselves over time. But (a) it’s a mobile CPU, and only the desktop CPUs had the problem there, and (b) it’s 11th gen.
RIP OP’s Kidney













