The mobo murderer RAM

smig · November 14, 2019

Even tho the consensus on the internet seems to be that RAM can not kill a computer, I think I've just murdered my second thinkpad with a stick of used ddr3l.

Could this just be the ram murdering my OS install or genuine cpu/gpu/mobo murder?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCUOsFvHY80&feature=youtu.be

To me this looks like a gpu issue. On the first murdered thinkpad (t430) I ran the ram for almost a week until I got a blue screen and the thing didn't ever want to boot outside of the dock. It did have similar graphical issues aswell after it.

I changed both the cpu and mobo at the same time on that one.

I decided to retry the used ram but just run memtest86 on it, but the laptop didn't want to boot at all, and when it did, i wasnt fast enough to pick the memtest86 option on grub. This is what awaited me on bootup.

Can someone explain what has happened here? What could be dead, could it just be eeprom corruption or something? Fairly annoyed that I keep killing great laptops. Usually just after spending hundreds of € to buy upgrades for them.

Also if someone wants to pay for shipping, I got 16 gigs of so-dimm ddr3l on offer for free ;)

DoctorNick · November 14, 2019

Hmm you say that the laptop wouldn't boot (before) unless it was in the dock. Then i would suspect that something is wrong with either the ribbon header or screen ribbon cable. Looking at the boot-up video it looks like a broken signal. That said, I can't say for sure that your memory is ok.

Edit: Do your L430 use integrated graphics? If it does, then yes it could be the memory as it's shared for the graphics card. Try with new sticks.

smig · November 16, 2019

Well the cable was brand new on the t430 since I had just modded it to have a fhd screen. And I tried with both brand new ram and the stuff I took off of the computers. Both do use integrated graphics, so that's why I'm thinking I might have just killed the cpu and the mobo is fine. Maybe.

But yea the boot problems were more like every 3rd time it would boot on the dock and never without it. It turns on normally the thinklight just before bios splash screen and then turns it off and it just got stuck with the thinklight on every time.