I tossed my G.SKILL in the oven!!!!

[=XAF=AfterShock]

Long story short I had 1 stick of gskill fail memtest, I have another kit on the way and decided I would try a nothing to lose shot in the dark so I set the oven for 400 and wrapped the stick in aluminum foil and let it bake for just under 10 min and then let it cool for around 20 minutes before putting the stick back in for testing. It's currently on pass 3 of 4 with 0 errors and if it makes it though 4 passes I'll put the other known good stick back in and see if it passes as a set. I don't have any explanation of why or how it worked but the only difference I see is that the stickers are no longer on the heatspreader and the solder joints are nice and shiny again. Do you think this will be a long term fix or I should I toss them when my new stuff arrives?

 

[stompah]

Is there a reason you didn't take advantage of their lifetime warranty?

 

[=XAF=AfterShock]

these were already used when I got them 2 years ago and it was either rma and be down for 2 weeks waiting for a replacement or order something else and try a long shot to buy time. It either worked or I'd be stuck with 1 stick until my new stuff arrives monday. If Gskill required proof of purchase for an rma I would be S.O.L.

 

[stompah]

I cannot remember if GSkill asked for my proof of purchase when I returned mine.


If your system has noncritical information on it then I would use it while it is stable. But if you have critical stuff like pictures, work info, tax info etc... I would toss the back stick and keep the good one as a back up. I wouldn't trust the baked stick to not have errors and potentially write bad info to your storage drive

 

[=XAF=AfterShock]

I ran memtest86 overnight and didn't have any errors but like you said I won't expect this to be a long term fix, my new memory is out for delivery so I'll put them in tonight after work and maybe keep these as a backup, I went with GSkill again as this is the 1st time i've had memory from them go bad, this time I have proof of purchase if I need to rma them in the future.

 

[stompah]

I would toss that baked stick. Just in case when you need it as a backup it doesn't give you trouble. Who knows if those refreshed solder joints will last long.

As for GSkill themselves. I had that one stick go bad and it was intermittent. Such a pain to figure out what it was. Like you, I have had luck with them and bought another set of GSkill. RMA process was easy.

 

[=XAF=AfterShock]

it took me half a day to realize my issue was memory related, random crashes and on reboots I would get 5 bsod in a row all saying different things like thread failure, critical process failure and when it would load to desktop I would have a code 52 error on my nvidia driver about a digital signature. It happened after installing windows updates so I thought that was the cause. I'm def going to toss the baked stick so if I ever have to use my backup stick I'm not stuck wondering why my computer keeps randomly crashing lol.

 

[stompah]

For me it was failing slowly. I don't even remember how long it was giving me trouble. 6 months or more maybe. Just random crashes or rebooting issues. Then finally one day I had a hard time booting into windows and if I did get in it locked up and rebooted. Finally started unplugging everything. Eventually, I took a stick out and every problem went away.

 

[=XAF=AfterShock]

Looking back I might have been having memory errors for awhile also, ever since I upgraded to a 5900x and started playing with curve optimizer I would get crashes or blue screens while booting, most times it would crash while the compute was just sitting idle at desktop which is why I thought it was because I was using too high of a negative offset. Event viewer would never show whea logger errors that might point me in the right direction, and then it went from the occasional crash to not even being able to boot from usb without blue screening. What a big time consuming headache a small 4mb chunk out of 32gb can cause.