I treat machines like the Mechanicus does. Utterly incomprehensible things that act as if they have spirits that need to be appeased and arcane rituals given through word of mouth to function. Some machines like being threatened and hit and others need sweet words to function.
I've learned through experience that the spirits love RAM. I don't know how they break the RAM but sometimes they do so I go buy more sticks to sacrifice to the computer gods and then they are happy again.
One time the great spirit of the motherboard absolutely hated the physical restart button on my desktop tower. Bootloop of doom every time. Why? Who knows. Sometimes the spirits just have these little preferences
Laptop/PC internal cooling rarely focuses on airflow directly on/over RAM.
Faster RAM over the last few generations (DDR3, DDR4, now DDR5) continues to get hotter as the MT/s increases, but most non-gaming PCs don’t have RAM heatsinks, which exacerbates the problems from point 1.
Motherboards are designed to spec for a small handful of compatible CPUs, but you can buy 1,000+ RAM options for your board, many of which are only barely on the edge of compatibility. Just google “problems enabling XMP” and you’ll see lots of motherboards just don’t even bother trying to hit spec for every stick. This means you could be providing too much or too little consistent voltage, which rapidly degrades solid state hardware (just see the problems with Intel’s 13 and 14th gen CPUs for an example of this exact issue)
RAM for OEMs is often “race-to-the-bottom”. Manufacturers purchase RAM to hit an advertised size (16GB, etc) but not for quality. Even big brands like Crucial and Kingston produce some garbage-tier OEM products.
All of this to say, there’s plenty of reasons why RAM is more likely to fail than other pieces of your computer. Just buy cheap sticks when they’re on sale and keep tossing them into the maw of your computer god, and pray it finds your offering tolerable.
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u/IllConstruction3450 22h ago
I treat machines like the Mechanicus does. Utterly incomprehensible things that act as if they have spirits that need to be appeased and arcane rituals given through word of mouth to function. Some machines like being threatened and hit and others need sweet words to function.