The RAM from HELL!

A week or two ago, I posted a question here about some Kingmax pc2700 RAM from newegg.com that appeared to be the same thing but priced differently with one of them being out of stock.

Well, I received the one for $65 and whoa,... this stuff sucks.

First of all its totally different from the stuff in my sig. The bad one ($65) has chips which are about twice as big as the good stuff which cost $79.

The good stuff ran up all the way to 193 FSB.
The bad stuff limped all the way up to 143 FSB.

I spent the whole evening adjusting and tweaking but nothing worked.

Then, I tried putting both sticks in at once, the good one in the first slot and the slowpoke in the second slot. Set it at 153 FSB and XP pro hangs on the "Welcome" screen. On the next boot I get a \windows\system32\config\system file missing or corrupted.

ARGH....

I did a bit of research... it seems this problem is not uncommon with a bad stick of RAM.

God bless Norton Ghost, cuz I loaded a drive image I made from 12-15-02 and after some updating the comp seems fine.

What sucks is that this was a gift which I received past the 7 day RMA period at Newegg.

Well, now I can recognize the good Kingmax from the bad.

Woah! Those descriptions were the same and the part numbers were slightly different... I didn't think there would be a big difference! And newegg really does change listings a lot when an item temporarily goes out of stock.

Those small chips you see are TinyBGA. Those are the same chips that it uses for pc3200. The big chips are the old design, and, as you have found out, won't go as fast.

P.S. I don't see anything about a 7-day only period on memory. And lots of companies make exceptions to that kind of rule on gifts. I'd at least give them a call.

tried to save $14 and got stuck with crap, that really sucks

The good news is that Newegg is giving a full refund That's good service.

The normal refund period for cpu and memory is seven days.

Newegg is just simply great when it comes to customer service.