recently there has been this problem that has been getting more frequent, my computer just randomly freezes up/blackscreens and then fails to post when i do a hard restart. this doesn’t resolve itself until after i open it up and play musical chairs with the ram for a bit.
shit that i have tried:
- swapped the ram around to different slots. sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t
- cleaned out the case
- wd40’d the ram pins (helped with the posting but seems to have increased crash frequency, not enough data to tell for sure)
no idea where to begin with this one, can’t tell if it’s a motherboard or a ram issue or something else entirely. the sticks are of differing sizes and manufacture so that may also be an issue. would give specs but the thing just died on me in the middle of posting this and i can’t boot in just yet. motherboard is a supermicro x9 something server board.
If you’ve tested each stick all by itself (no others plugged in) in a few different slots and all of them have this issue, that suggests that it’s not the sticks and possibly not the slots either. If it were one of those two options you’d expect to be able to find one stable single stick + slot option, as you’d think that only one would break at a time. One stick breaking or one slot (or single pair of slots).
For your graphics card, do you also have an integrated one in the CPU? If so, I’d remove your discrete card and see if it’s more stable. You’d need to switch your monitor cable to a different receptacle, of course. If that’s not an option, I’d come up with ways to “ping” your computer under the assumption that maybe it is posting and working but just not showing you anything. You could set up an ssh server or similar and auto-login and see whether you can still get in after one of these incidents and a hard reset
The inconsistency of the memory issue makes new think it isn’t memory (no single stick at a time is stable in any slot, right?). I’d start removing more components to see if any minimal set is stable.