Dropped (physically) my RAM. Should I be worried?

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friend'scatdied

[H]ard|Gawd
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Feb 20, 2005
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I was dismantling my Shuttle this evening and foolishly dropped my PNY XLR8 DDR2-800 stick. It actually made two falls -- one about two feet onto my desk, where it bounced and fell an additional 3 feet onto the floor. Here's a picture of the part that concerns me -- I'm not particularly sure if this was there before the drop (sorry for the poor quality, dorm lights are dim and my 3GS sucks):
pnyddr2drop.jpg


I cleaned the RAM with 91% isopropyl alcohol and let it dry for about a half hour to be sure. I booted up the machine with JUST that one stick in (as opposed to all four sticks I normally used). It booted just fine. I ran a memory check through POST and for some reason the memory check went all the way to 8GB and kept looping back down to 0 and going over in an infinite loop (no test failed, no stopping, no nothing). The only difference I had from the last POST was going down to 1x2GB of memory and removing my GTS 250 (so the GMA X4500HD, with shared memory, was being utilized). Could the BIOS have still been thinking I had 8GB in for whatever reason?

Anyway, I booted into Windows just fine and ran IntelBurn on Max stress level (most RAM utilization) for the default 5 cycles. It ran fine, and temps and voltages looked normal through Everest.

For clarity the stressed-looking whitish region does not actually infringe on the gold contact in that area. The contact is completely intact going by my eyes. I have NO idea whether this was there all along or a result of the drop. There is no other visible "damage" to the sticks. Should I be worried, or am I just being paranoid and is DDR more resilient than I'm thinking?
 
No, it will be fine as long as no flakes get into the RAM slot and bridge any connections.
 
Run memtest overnight. If it goes through 15 passes, you should be fine.
 
Will it make a difference if I run memtest with all four sticks vs. just the questionable one (i.e. is memtest more thorough on the one stick alone)? Might as well run on all four if the lone stick will get tested the same when I rebuild the machine.
 
friend'scatdied said:
Will it make a difference if I run memtest with all four sticks vs. just the questionable one (i.e. is memtest more thorough on the one stick alone)? Might as well run on all four if the lone stick will get tested the same when I rebuild the machine.
Click to expand...

The thing is, if you run only one stick and Memtest shows errors, you know easily which stick has a problem.
 
Assuming nothing broke or fell off it should be fine.
 
I did the same exact thing one time but instead of it falling and boucing it hit the coner on the desk and a contact 2 of them popped up. I pushed them into place and looked to see if the the rams contacts touched the pins in the socket.... they did and it worked for about 2 months. then one day as i forgot i pulled the ram becasue i started haveing what was memery errors. I pulled it then and then put it back in without looking. two of the pins crossed and touched the same contact. it fried the board . the identical contacts on the oppisite side had burn marks the same exact way as the burn marks on the other side that hadint got scraped off . so be careful it should be fine for a while if the contacts are ok assuming you put it in right! Mine was a 168 pin sd
 
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