I buy and sell hardware on eBay and Craigslist to finance my crunchers. I do pretty well - I have managed to finance several machines over the last few years - I now have 2 dual E5-2670s, one with 2xGTX 1080s and one with 3xGTX 980s. And it has been fun doing it.

But I have recently had an interesting problem selling 4x8GB of DDR3 1600MHz desktop RAM on eBay - the buyers have had problems with them, despite the fact that I run them through at least 1 pass on Memtest before even putting them up for sale. And when I got them returned to me, I retested them with Memtest - no problems! One was a set of Crucial Ballistix, the other, Team Vulcan.

My question is - what could cause this? In one case, the user said he had Memtest problems with them. But I don't. Maybe I should dismiss this as a form of buyer's remorse? But the other user claimed he had problems with the RAM in Windows (don't know which version). Is it possible that (since the RAM is the max possible for the desktop and CPU involved) that there is a (subtle) problem with the CPU's on-board memory controller? Or some configuration problem in Windows?

Any ideas? And thanks for reading this and your time!

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1 pass of Memtest isn't enough IMHO.

You need to heat them up with several passes as I've seen memory that will pass up to 3 passes and then fall over after that. ;-)

Cheers.

Since it was 32GB, the pass took > 3 hours. I thought that was enough, especially since the buyer had the problem(s) after a short time. But I suppose he could have bad air flow in his system. I use an open bench (motherboard on my desktop). Easy enough to see - I will run it overnight.

Thanks for the suggestion.

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i thought one pass was enough, but some combinations of motherboard and ram just don't get along.

for work i usually buy whatever's popular on amazon, and that's usually basic crucial or kingston. i've been cheap sometimes and got stuff like patriot that may have needed to be swapped out

i remember a while back my friend gave me some ballistix and he said they were bad but i might have got them to work

for my own purposes i've also got stuff like corsair, but not sure that it makes a performance difference

Interesting question since I have been lurking over at OC.net for the past month. There was 4 pages of posts yesterday dealing with RAM issues. Ryzen is very picky at the moment with RAM and the discussions highlighted a couple of things that your post brought up. First is that Crucial Ballistix isn't held in very high regard. Lots of problems on the Intel platforms. Very picky about what motherboard they are compatible with. Second, is that the secondary timings on a RAM stick, doesn't matter the make or model, and ones that you normally don't have any control over, can make some RAM completely incompatible with some specific motherboards or RAM controllers. About the only thing you can guarantee at all with regard to RAM is that it is supposed to be 100% JEDEC 2133 Mhz compatible on ALL platforms. Anything more or else is considered an overclock and you take your chances with any platform or motherboard.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Lots of posts lately that Memtest isn't all that great for really verifying the stability of RAM. The preferred memory test program has been HCI Memtest Pro. Now there is another, TechPowerUp MemTest64, that is considered even better because it discovers the failure or RAM quicker than 100% coverage of HCI MemTest Pro.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

I've been using MemTest64 for many years now.

Cheers.

Didn't realize it had been around that long. I only had knowledge and experience with the DOS based MemTest86. The ASUS product support guys were swearing by HCI MemTest and then some of the forum people mentioned that MemTest64 was even better than HCI MemTest. What I was totally unaware of was that these new programs can actually run inside Windows as graphical interfaces. I always thought you had to drop down to bare bones to get full coverage of RAM outside of Windows.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

More to the point the specification of machines with the same name may vary between vendors, countries, and date. This is not too bad at the server end of the market, but when you get down to desktops and laptops it can be anyone's guess as to what a hardware particular machine contains. For example we have a number of Lenovo L420 laptops, some cameras, some don't, some have bigger hard disks than others, some have 2.1GHz processors, some have 2.3Gz, indeed no two are the same, but all were bought at the same time and to the same "base".

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

Well, I ran overnight (11 hrs, 32 mins) with no errors. Kind of what I thought.

As far as high/low density, that was a ddr2 thing, I thought. (Almost all Intel ddr2 chipsets could only handle (max) 2gb ddr2 RAM sticks, but AMD could do 4gb sticks). I had not heard that it was relevant to ddr3 until it popped up in this thread. NEVER seen it mentioned before.

Besides, it was never relevant for name brand RAM, IIRC. Only saw it advertised on eBay, with unbranded RAM.

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That was a major issue with Dell during the days of DDR1/2 in that no more than 6 banks of ram could be used. As I haven't dealt with any Dell machines using DDR3, don't know if that issue has been resolved.

That was a major issue with Dell during the days of DDR1/2 in that no more than 6 banks of ram could be used. As I haven't dealt with any Dell machines using DDR3, don't know if that issue has been resolved.

Me neither.

But the problems I was talking about were with homebuilt machines, not Dell (or any other pre-built machines).

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With Ryzen currently, it is very hard to get any dual rank memory sticks to run at anything other than 2133 Mhz. You might get lucky and get them to 2400 or 2666 but forget trying to get 2933 or 3200 working. Your best bet is to get single rank, Samsung B-die preferably CL16 or CL14. I went through 3 RAM kits trying to find ones that work at 3200. I managed to get Samsung B-dies in a 3600 CL16 kit that I have working at 3200 CL14. It is very messy right now with RAM. You might get SK Hynix or Micron dies in major brand 3200 kits. In the beginning, the information was that if you just got 3200 kits you would be guaranteed of getting Samsung B-dies. Then it changed to if you get CL14 or faster you were guaranteed to get Samsung B-dies. Neither of those cases turned out to be 100% true. Right now if you want more than 16 GB you cannot do so without running into dual-rank memory. The dies just aren't enough density at reasonable consumer prices. The motherboard manufacturers have been very slow in developing memory QVL lists for their AM4 products. You have to poke your nose into the popular Ryzen threads and read a lot or ask if the RAM kit you are considering is working at spec or not. And DDR4 prices have just about doubled since late last year. All of this is supposed to change when AMD releases new major AGESA microcode next month that everyone hopes brings the Ryzen architecture up to parity with the memory environment of Intel. That is supposed to make every RAM kit work as designed. Crossing my fingers.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Well, I ran overnight (11 hrs, 32 mins) with no errors. Kind of what I thought.

As far as high/low density, that was a ddr2 thing, I thought. (Almost all Intel ddr2 chipsets could only handle (max) 2gb ddr2 RAM sticks, but AMD could do 4gb sticks). I had not heard that it was relevant to ddr3 until it popped up in this thread. NEVER seen it mentioned before.

Besides, it was never relevant for name brand RAM, IIRC. Only saw it advertised on eBay, with unbranded RAM.

I had an issue with ddr3. I was going to max out the ram, to 8 GB, and bought some single sided ddr3 sticks. Plug them into mobo, nothing. So dug into the mobo manual... and learned that my board does not take single sided sticks. Bought some double sided sticks and everything works.

Now. This obviously does not apply to your cases since the people who bought from you were able to boot their machines and run memtest. But this does show that ddr3 is not universal.

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