Bad RAM? Looks like it

Community Support
1

Hi All,

I just got a FW16 (DIY) and followed the assembly guide. Powered on for the first time and got nothing. I searched the web and some said “Yeah DDR5 training takes a while, just wait.” Which I did (setting a timer for 20 minutes) and nothing. But guessing it might be my RAM (2 X 16GB) I took one stick out and moved the channel 1 stick to channel 0. It booted!

Put the other stick back in, and tried again, and at least I saw the “Framework” logo on the screen but it did not boot. A very small “Boot Succeeded” followed by black screen.

So I thought “maybe channel 1 is not working?” so I put the SODIMM from channel 1 into channel 0 (leaving the former ch 0 sodimm out) and no joy. It didn’t boot.

So I took the sodimm that had worked by itself before and put it into channel 1 and took out the sodimm in channel 0. That boots!

So I have one sodimm, that can be in either DRAM slot, and it boots (if it is the only one). And one sodimm that won’t boot alone from either slot, nor will the system book with that sodimm installed in either slot across from the one that works.

Now when it shows the logo, if I pop it into the bios (F12), it shows having detected 32GB, but it won’t boot.

So I’m thinking I should RMA this SODIMM? I’ve ordered a matched pair of DDR5 5600 sodimms from Amazon (yeah, who knows how legit they are) and tomorrow might have a working system. Or might not.

Any suggestions here?
–Chuck

2

Yes, that obviously sounds like one RAM stick is defect. It happens. Probably return the pair and order another one. It’s often better to order from computer part sellers instead of Amazon because Amazon is unable to test returned products and often just sells them again if they look okay and they source their parts from wherever.

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Yep, definitely an RMA on this one; RAM vendors that don’t validate their claims are a pain. This often happens with low-quality RAM.

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Well a quick update. Replacing the RAM with the RAM from Amazon and I can boot with both slots occupied. So that is an improvement. They only had 64G (2 x 32) rather than 32G (2 x 16) so that is actually two changes (capacity and vendor). Booting was somewhat random until I set the iGPU memory to “gaming” mode (forces 4GB to the iGPU) this seems non-optimal? (running Lubuntu 24 because FreeBSD won’t install) Now setting up a memtest iso image to boot so that I can run memory tests. Will see how that goes.

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Nice, yeah if you changed the RAM and it works fine, the capacity wasn’t the issue, if anything you’ll have more issue with a greater capacity as it means more physical RAM chips so more things can go wrong. Also, a larger ram capacity hits the RAM controller of the CPU harder. So it definitely was a bad stick.

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