I placed RAM into my motherboard without realizing there was a single drop on liquid metal ( Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut) on the back of one of the pins (which shorted my last mainboard from a botched CPU thermal paste application), which led to the new motherboard not posting, so then I swapped the RAM sticks and got a small amount of liquid metal in both RAM slots. I was able to clean them out and got it to post yesterday, but this morning it won’t post, even with new RAM, and I’m getting the “DDR initialized OK” error from the LED indicator. Is there any way for this to be repaired?
Windows 11, 12th gen intel i7
Welcome to the forum.
So the led is Red for the 11th flash?
If you see no liquid metal left in the slots, then the damage sounds like might not be the slot. But instead elsewhere on the board, due to the short.
If you haven’t heard of it, phase change thermal pads are a safer, easier alternative to liquid metal.
[Honeywell PTM7950 Phase Change Thermal Pads/Sheets] Application, Tips, and Results
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Where else would be damaged/ what should I be checking? Ya, 11 is red. Tried with different RAM sticks, both slots, it’s likely not the RAM stick that’s the problem
Repaired, most definitely. Easily repaired, depends. Based on how bad the potential short was, it could have damaged multiple IC’s or god forbid traces. If you can find someone in the community with a known good board and you’ve got time with the pinout for RAM, you could potentially trace the circuit and look for any rails that don’t have the correct voltage on them. This level of board repair can be prohibitively time expensive which is why depending on the nature of the damages and expertise level of technician they might not even attempt it.
It could even be that there are still some residuals in the slot and from the laptop running the heat generated or movement shifted it to cause it to fail to POST. I would try cleaning again and inspecting thoroughly.
AS LONG AS YOU DON’T MIND THE POSSIBILITY OF WASTED TIME OR FURTHER DAMAGE TO THE BOARD, THAT IS THE ONLY INSTANCE WHERE I WOULD PROCEED WITH THE FOLLOWING.
If you’d like to try attempting to troubleshoot this without outright replacement, I would first start with visually checking your mainboard and RAM. Are there any obvious signs of damage? Feel around. Are there any hot spots on the board or IC’s?
Additionally, if you’re willing to, check the RAM in a known good machine. Just know that it may cause damage if it is the culprit.
After the visual inspection, if nothing is obvious you may need to start doing testing with a multimeter to check for shorts or erroneous voltages. It’s a great way to learn and analyze how IC’s and circuts in general work, but like I said very time intensive if you don’t know exactly how it works.
If your primary goal is just to get it fixed, check with a repair shop that knows what they’re doing and/or reach out to Framework via support.
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I am so confused. I was testing with a multimeter, took the mainboard out to deep clean again and get pictures for this post, plugged it back in to see if the error codes changed… and now it’s working again. I’m worried it may stop working again but fingers crossed I guess
Liquid metal thermal interface materials are based on gallium alloys. I read that gallium reacts to gold. Almost all computer plugs and contacts are gold-plated, including RAM slots and the contacts on RAM itself. How fast and how badly gallium reacts with gold I don’t know. Some of the pins may no longer be making reliable enough contact due to a reaction with gallium. And you may never be able to “clean” it off, as it will infiltrate the structure of the gold. It might be a little extreme, but I’d treat any RAM that you’ve had in those slots as contaminated and not put them into any other computer (that they haven’t already touched, at least).
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