Can a motherboard take out memory when its RAM slots fail?

viivo

viivo

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Sep 7, 2005
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Had an MSI board die, the cause of which turned out to be the simultaneous death of all four RAM slots. Just got a new board and now only two of my DIMMs work. Was this a astronomically unlikely coincidence or did the MSI board kill my RAM?
 
It really depends on how things got damaged. It could be that a short happened on the motherboard and caused damage to the RAM. It could also have been the RAM which is damaged and caused a short in the motherboard. But these are usually rare, but it does happen.
 
MB has VRM that control V to the RAM and if these failed somehow sending a huge surge of juice when they went then yes they may have killed the RAM.

I remember with DDR BH5 the V use to come from the 3.3v line and it had to be increased to ~3.7v for overclocking the RAM but any higher and the PSU OVP would cut in making it fairly hard to kill the RAM with to much V.
But with modern RAM needing less V and possibly not even running from the 3.3v PSU rail the potential is there.
 
2 VRM's on my last MSI board got so damn hot the white board got singed.
I can see that killing RAM if the Vmem VRM failed.
 
For sure if it's a VRM failure it can over-volt the RAM. There's really no protection against that and I always get nervous changing voltages in BIOS, get that wrong and it's a sure way to fry components.
 
Yes, anytime.you have a VRM failure it's not uncommon for the mosfet to short incoming power to outgoing (supposed to be regulated) power. Not uncommon to end up with 12v on a 5/3.3/1.8/etc volt line. Plug in a new chip, instant toast.
 
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