Flaming hot RAM, motherboard damage?

I've got a nice little home-built rig that has served me very nicely as a gaming machine for the past almost-two-years. No problems until recently. See, I originally had two gigs of RAM in the thing, then I bought some additional RAM later to put in the full 4 gigs.

Well, recently, my computer got crash-crazy, and after a night of troubleshooting, I discovered that even though my computer has an over-done amount of fan-driven ventilation (keeps everything else nice and cool), the original 2 gigs of RAM were hot enough to BURN MY FINGERTIP, even when the computer was sitting idle at the Windows desktop. I don't really know how long they've been like that, but it's not too far fetched to think they've been that way since I first bought them.

So I threw them in the trash, bought more of the RAM I bought most recently, which is barely lukewarm when idle, and nice and fast. But, I still got a complete screen-freak-out crash every now and then, after which my computer would suddenly reset. This happened often while doing something RAM-intensive like trans-coding some MP3s (legal stuff, I swear!).

I've narrowed it down to where if any RAM is in the slots that belonged to the old, overheated RAM, shit starts happening. The newer RAM sticks are otherwise perfectly fine in the other slots.

Could it be that RAM gets hot enough to do damage to the motherboard behind it? I never really considered it a possibility seeing how thin the connector bit is, but what do yall think?

At this point, I'm probably gonna get a new mobo anyway, it's just such a freak thing to me that I'm curious if anyone else has had an issue like this! Weird as hell...

 

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It could be the other way around, the motherboard slots could have broken, and overheated the RAM instead.

 

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Fess up over clocked or no?

Anyway - putting in more ram actually stresses out the 1st two slots more.

You will need to relax the timings on the ram.

 

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Nope, I don't overclock, never felt the need to, my computer's plenty powerful as it is.

The new RAM chips are just fine temperature-wise, I don't think lowering the clock speed is necessary temperature-wise. I just think I bought shitty RAM, plain and simple. Are you saying lowering the speed is necessary because I'm using all the slots? Kinda makes sense now that I think about it...

While I'm at it, yes, the old RAM I threw out and the new RAM both have their own heat spreaders.

Oh, and I just looked a little more closely at my mobo, and the RAM slots where the original, overheated RAM was plugged, well, the plastic has lost it's color right about where the chips were on the old RAM sticks! It got THAT hot. No other melting of chips or solder that I can see though...

Appreciate the help guys!

 

I would hesitate a guess that perhaps you're system is poorly earthed or the PSU you are currently using is the wrong one for the motherboard. It's difficult to say however without you naming every part in your system and of course Identifying what your PSU's output is.

 

Unless you overclock your ram like hell it should NOT be that hot, which means soemthing is up with the slots and id have a tech guy check it out, cuz unless you are seriosuly amping up the votlage there is no reason for it to be hot. Worse case scenario, it gives you an excuse to egt a water cooling system, id recommend koolance, theyve got soem of the ebst RAM coolers out there

 

A picture would help. If the ram slots are black you may not see any damage but i doubt the slots themselves are damaged. how about the contacts, any difference between them?

 

There is a potential that the RAM you purchased is different from the RAM you had and this might require either a BIOS flash (updating the BIOS) or a setting change in BIOS. (You might be putting too much power through the RAM).

It does sound like a power problem though, thats why I mentioned you should perhaps ID your PSU and motherboard. (I'm guessing you dropped a pretty hefty PSU in into your box to cover all your fans which might be a higher output than the motherboard is suppose to take.)

Maybe this old thread (on another site) can help:
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/884261.html

 

Actually, maybe what he did wrong was that his old ram was an older model, ie DDR, and he tried putting in DDR2 or even DDR3, which both may demand more power, and since that happened, the old ones got more power than they should have and got roasted.

Check the sides of your RAM there should be a sticker or insignia that says DDR, DDR2, or DDR3, compare your old and new RAM.

 

Yep. Any pluggable component can damage the motherboard with excess heat. I've done it plenty of times.

 

Here's the build...

-PC Power & Cooling S75CF 750W Power Supply
-GIGABYTE GA-X38-DQ6 Motherboard
-Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Processor
-2 x ATI Radeon HD3850 (in crossfire)
-160 gb SATA Hard Drive (can't remember brand)
-500 gb SATA Hard Drive (" " ")
-ASUS CD-ROM/ burner of some sort
-Antec 900 Case with enough fans to make it lift off the ground

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Original two sticks of RAM that overheat like crazy even though I don't OC:
-Crucial Ballistix Tracer 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500)

New RAM being used...
-G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500)

There are two pairs of dual-channel slots, one yellow, the other orange/red. The yellow one held the Crucial modules, and now the regions of the slots nearest to the chips on the modules are faded to pure white.

Other then that, the slots look fine, I don't see any other motherboard damage like partially-melted chips or blown caps or anything. I even took to cleaning the slots with some clean lintless paper to make sure the contacts were solid, tried it again with the new G.Skill ram in the old Crucial slots, and the same thing happened.

Too bad too, when I run it with all four gigs installed, it runs beautifully right up till everything freezes and/or the screen suddenly flickers static for a brief second as the computer reboots.

Thanks again for the help! So whadaya think? Power supply too small? It's done fine with 4 gigs for quite some time, was only recently that this started happening. I should mention that this was also after a move across the country (+2000 miles) with my computer in the car (protected from heat I should add by a mountain of clothes and a reflective tarp, which I checked, and it worked beautifully). I wonder if the shaking might've done something to it...

 

Yay for the antec 900's, ive got the same case and i love it.

here's my build

Antec 900
Nvidia 780i sli motherboard
TWO Geforce 260 GTX graphics cards in sli. overclocked
Intel core 2 quad Q9450 overclocked
4 gigglebytes of ram

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H|T Omega sound card

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I think I've spotted the problem, at least by looking at the PDF manual.

"Dual Channel memory configuration" suggests when you only have two sticks to place one stick in both DDRII1and DDRII3 or DDRII2 and DDRII4.

However you are still having the problem when occupying all four slots now.

What I suggest you try doing is putting the Crucial RAM in slots 1 and 3 and the G.Skill in the other two slots. I'm hoping this will fix the problem by matching the RAM. Give it a bash.

If that doesn't work, then I'd suggest either flashing your BIOS to a more recent one, or if the problems seem to be occurring since the last flash, downgrade to a previous BIOS version. (Caution: remember that you are on your own here, if a BIOS fails, sometimes there isn't much you can do

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)

Incidentally, your MB comes across as 1.8v for RAM, the Crucial RAM is stated to be 2.2v and the G.Skill 2.1v I'm not entirely sure how the voltage would effect the RAM, if anything I would assume it wouldn't work as efficiently, if anyone else has any thoughts on this feel free to share.

Also don't forget you can check your BIOS for the RAM power (DDR18v) or possibly use programs similar to speedfan to find out through an operating system.

 

I apprecaite the suggestion but I am aware of the dual-channel setup and yep, the Cruicials were in 1 and 3 while the new G.Skill are in 2 and 4. 1 and 3 are the ones that appear damaged.

I might play with the bios a bit, you could be right there...

Thanks again!

 

Heeey.... so Stryder, you might be onto something with the voltage. I looked in my BIOS and found it running the RAM at 2.14 v, a smidge more then G.Skill is supposed to use, maybe causing an issue when I run 4 sticks at once...

Only problem is that Gigabyte's tweaking tools let you overvolt, but not lower voltage, which kinda sucks. I flashed the BIOS to see if that was updated, and no change to voltage or any new options to lower, so I'm gonna give Gigabyte a little e-mail...

 

Weed eater, all of those overclocking programs are just tools, the originaly way to overclock is to go to BIOS and do it manually, those programs you download just simplify it.

 

I WAS in the bios, and yet it only let me overvolt stuff, not undervolt! Wierd, right?!

 

Weed_eater_guy,
You don't need to "undervolt". You see the systems standard voltage for RAM is 1.8v, this means if you want it to run at 2.1v you have to increase it by +0.30v in the BIOS.

You'll have to do some Trial and Error testing of which voltage makes it stable.

 

That's the thing, my mobo seems to try and make that adjustment already, and I can't tell it not to. So, by "undervolt", I mean undo some of the correction the motherboard seems to believe it's "correcting". Then again, intuition tells me that .04 volts over isn't a big deal, but, meh, I dunno anymore... guess it's about time to buy some 2x2gb ram for the slots that work, and if that doesn't work a new mobo. Wouldn't be the end of the world to have a better mobo I suppose.

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Well I'm guessing it's trying to balance between the 2.1v and 2.2v which is why you are getting somewhere in between. You'd have to replace one set of them, make sure you keep the voltage the same.

You could try boosting it to higher than 2.1v, but as you know the heat increases the more voltage you put through, so you'd require RAM fans and still suffer the wear and tear of 'overclocking'.