DDR3 bad on my Jan 2013 PC

I built my current desktop PC in January 2013. It’s ran great all this time, except for last year my SSD where I had my OS installed went bonkers, dead, not booting, nothing one can do with such a brick.

Pretty ok, since I didn’t have anything personal in Windows, all my STUFF was saved on other harddrives. My programs though, I had to find disks and track down the online downloads for some of my disks that were just not showing their faces to me. I got everything back in order with a new SSD.

In October I swapped using Plex to Emby. I noticed decidedly different battery consumption with Emby, using Chrome to watch my stuff on my Samsung S3 tablet. I never had to transcode with Plex, only ran some of my bigger things through Handbrake to make a lighter load on my tablet or phone if they were frequently watched, and there are some of those, hello Tolkien.

Time rolls on, and near the end of January I had a couple of freeze issues while using my computer. Last sound of whatever was happening when it froze was stuttering, repeating very annoyingly and mouse and keyboard were unresponsive. Hard shut down was the only option.

I had one BSOD then. The information was less than straightforward.

I had my Emby movie watching freeze two nights in a row, my tablet was OK just the movie was stuck. I went to my PC and sure enough, frozen.

In this case I checked out the Emby settings and noticed that Hardware Acceleration was on (I don’t think I did that, but who knows for sure.) I turned that off and hadn’t had a freeze like that since. But why would that have a connection to my Memory being a problem, and it’s all fine, for the most part, with HA off.

At any rate I felt bad about my PC though. It was a champion for me for years, 32gb of Memory strong. Then sure, 32gb of memory, but suddenly everything fritzing out, wasn’t right. I had Spotify playing and Fieldrunners, shut down Fieldrunners and started up Terraria and bleep.

Another freeze was Netflix, it just Froze suddenly.

Windows Memory Diagnostics told me there was a hardware problem. I have no one to contact, I built the thing over 6 years ago. So I started flip flopping the memory and testing on Saturday and Finished on Sunday.

MSI z77 motherboard, DIMM Slots 2&4 were matched RAM from a kit, and 1&3 were also matched Ram from a kit pair.

Slots 1 & 2 & 3 ran fine, the last slot, not the slot, but the Memory in that slot, was the bugger. The furthest from the CPU.

Each stick except that one ran alone just fine. The other kit of memory from 1 & 3 are now in slots 2 & 4, and the one stick that is still good from the other kit is in slot 1 with slot 3 empty now. It’s sad looking.

Determination that it was problemed for sure enough and leaving it out of the PC, putting it all back together, no longer 32GB, just 24GB now, but everything is solid again.

I had two movies on last night, transcoded while streaming, and 50% of my battery was gone. That’s really weird of late. It’s pretty good I mean.

I was actually worried that my lone Graphics card was going bad, it lost it’s dual last year when I had the side opened, something, a CD maybe, fell in and melted on one of the graphics cards, and my computer was smoking but nothing was on fire. It was really a freak accident, probably one of the cats jumping up to the Window. Everything else was fine then, but retelling it now, it’s like, the SSD died earlier in the year, later the Graphic card died. Now one of Memory Modules must be retired. I had replaced my SSD, had to. I would have liked to replace the Graphic card, but just haven’t. Now the Memory it’s $79 on Amazon for a 16GB8x2 kit. That’s what I’d need and I want to do that at least.

If my last graphics card fritzed out I’d be really upset. I use a big 4k TV for my monitor, I do not want 1080p on this thing. NO THANK YOU!

I’ll be building a new computer for me sometime this year, I hope, and passing this computer to one of my children, and am wanting it in tip-top shape when it’s passed off.