When it’s being used at the rated settings and there is no power surge? One of my 512MB sticks went bad, and I am working on RMA’ing it (Lifetime warranty) but I am wondering what could have caused it to happen.
Beware of plugging external devices into your computer without surge protection. I.E. tv card aerials,video,dvd recorders & Xbox' etc. Those surge protection boards with aerial & telephone protection are worth it.You can sometimes feel the charge off the aerial jack regardless whether there is a surge or not. (Writing from experience). Then again,some fault in its manufacture was just waiting to make your day,maybe. P.S. Reread your post & was wondering how you knew there was no power surge? I included the examples in case you had not considered one of them as a surge risk.
Tons of factors, power surges, manufacturing defects and such. Although my personal list goes like this due to the fact i OC. 1. Heat Death (ICs obviously die at high enough temperature) 2. Electromigration (High voltages no good for chippies even with good cooling) 3. Overloading (Depends on your motherboard's power delivery reliability)
Well let’s see. No heat issue, as I have placed my hand in the case as it's running (after removing the side panel) and it's just warm, with a good airflow. Everything gets all nice and cooled, and nothing is hot. (Except some of the heatsink on the CPU.) As for Electromigration, that would have come up before as that module in particular was placed in 3 different boards to test it. (I wanted to show people the effect of increasing the RAM as well, that I took care of two things at once) Overloading, wouldn’t that fry both the cards? They were in banks 1 and 3, and the card in bank 3 is the one that went bad. There is no real abnormal input. All my external I/O devices are as fallows: Keyboard Mouse Webcam Speakers Printer Moniter NIC
electromigration is also known as sudden death syndrome, it just happens if the ICs are either subjected to extremely high voltages, or if the silicon they're based on is just inferior and gates just cut under the pressure. Well, i'm just going to say that even with superior tech processes these days, it still comes down to good ol luck lol.
One last thought,banks 1 & 3 may both have been stressed but the ram in bank 3 might have been slightly inferior to stick 1 in the manufacturing process.
