I originally had a amd 5200+ on an am2+ motherboard with 2x2gb sticks of ram. Recently one of these sticks got corrupted/broken so I sent them for a warranty repair, upon their return everything was fine for a while and then the same thing occured again. This pc had been working fine for about 18months till then. At this point I thought there was probably something wrong with the motherboard but decided to take this as an oppurtunity for a full upgrade purchasing a new i5 760 a GA-P55A-UD3 and 2x2gb corsair xms3 cl9. I also changed the case to an antec 300 and got a xfx 750w black edition. I got a 2nd hand gtx 260 from a friend. The only items I reused were the 2 IDE dvd drives, 2 1tb spinpoint f3's, a wireless card and an asus xonar pci-e sound card. The sound card and 2nd f3 drive (storage) were added more recently to the original computer about 2-3months before any issues started to occur. Now the same problem has occurred again after 2 days with this new system. I understand that it could just be that the new ram I ordered had a problem with it. However, this all seems a bit too coincidental. I am wondering if any of the components which I have reused could cause this problem. Or if it is even possible for a virus to be on one of the hard drives that I use for data storage and so did not get reformatted during the new build, though I'm not sure a virus could permanently break a stick of ram. Another odd thing of note is that all of the sticks that broke were in the 2nd memory slot of the dual channel pair. Sorry for the wall of text but any insight/solution would be useful.
Unless you've broken another stick of ram , I would point the finger at 1 of the hard drives starting to fail. As you say thats the only thing that hasn't been changed .A virus can't attack ram, thats for sure, as it's volatile memory as soon as it doesn't have any power going through it , it'll for get everything. Check the hard discs for errors and lets us know how you get on.
HDD's shouldn't break RAM, corrupt data, yes, but physically break it, no. The only thing I can think of is that something is screwing with the voltages on the board, but this should have a drastic impact on the CPU, it's odd how it's specifically just that RAM. Could just be unlucky, these things can happen often. When my best mate did his last major upgrade he had 2 faulty Rampage Extremes which killed 2 kils of RAM...
Just finished scanning both hdd's with Hdtune came up clean on the full scan and the health check so there doesn't appear to be a problem there. I suppose I could have just been unlucky but seeing this happen 3 times now just seemed odd to me. Unless its possible one of the other components is messing up the voltage lines somehow.
this kind of thing is very hard to test. Try to contact the RMA people and see if they can shed any light on it.
This morning the other stick of ram seems to have given up. I will indeed contact the RMA people/store t see what they say, though I may also replace the 2 hdd's and the wireless card seeing as it won't cost too much.
Just thought I'd post a quick update. I was trying to connect up my laptop with a docking station so I wouldn't have to use the small screen or keyboard and my desktop screen was having trouble connecting to it and dispalying the image, it was reacting like there was something connected but that the output was just black. However, if I turned the screen off and then back on the output displayed correctly for a few seconds. After this I managed to borrow a screen and now my desktop seems to run fine. After some testing one of the ram sticks seems to be ok while the other failed a memory test though did not throw any errors during an hour of prime95. It seems that somehow the screen caused/exagerated a problem in the ram.
Thats very odd, I've never come across this before. I would have thought it'd have affected your graphics card, as this has many more parts which are more easily damaged.
