The RAM sticks I just bought off eBay

Zeon@lemmy.world to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 411 points –
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If it's any decent brand it's lifetime warranty little questions asked.

Oh wow I didn't know that. They're from Crucial / Micron, also its DDR3L ECC RAM (8GB x 4) so hopefully they'll accept. Thank you for the information!

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Pin D10 tied to a high. Seen that, got my soldering people fix that.

I'm very curious how you figured that out from the screen shot?

They're a fucking wizard that one.

Na, I just know how these things tick. I've written a RAM test for my system, and had to diagnose to one or other production error in my lifetime.

I wrote a RAM test for my system, and had to diagnose quite a few badly soldered boards. I leave the soldering to the specialists, though. All but one still does not understand how I can read "Resolder pin 14 from chip J11" or "Clean short between pins 8 and 9 on chip J14" from such a list.

Computer Jesus has entered the chat

DDR3 was really hard to find the last time I went shopping for RAM.

I bet you can get at least another 5 more years out of that computer.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/65726/intel-xeon-processor-e3-1275-v2-8m-cache-3-50-ghz.html

This is actually a new build I just made with a Libreboot motherboard. I'm trying to turn it into a gaming computer, it ran GTA V at 70-80FPS, all high settings, at 1440p. It was working flawlessly, and for some reason now its not I suppose due to the RAM.

But even with this RAM, in the beginning it was working just fine until yesterday I started noticing more stuttering. Vulkan shaders might be interfering, but I did enable them to process in the background and to save the cache but nope, still stuttering.

I was hoping to do a benchmark video for people tonight but I'll have to wait until later next week.

Cool. You might check and double check the RAM timings. My machine did not like to run at 1600.

Looks like there's actually a stuck bit in those memory values. Might be more than just an unstable clock.

I really only know enough about hardware to get by. I am working through nand2tetris though.

eBay not only blacklisted me but also my home address for presenting "a risk to our eBay community" when all I have ever done was buy a USB cable. Just one. Once.

Nice to see they have their priorities straight. /s

This sounds like an interesting story? Any additional details?

Nope, I was logging into my eBay account to check on when my cable would be delivered and got a big message saying my account's been suspended. Emailed them and they said I needed to call them. Called them and they said my account's been suspended and my home address has been blacklisted. I asked why, and they said they had nothing more to tell me.

Literally the only thing I have ever done on eBay is search for and buy one USB cable, one time.

FWIW, I had a similarish experience with my local Craigslist equivalent (Gumtree)... They had a security breach, which led to my barely-used account being hacked by someone that was posting (I assume) fake car listings.

I reported it to them, and their response was to blacklist me. No great loss - why would I want to use a platform that badly managed. I later worked with one of their mid-level managers from that period, and yeah-it was an absolute shitshow there.

It's pretty silly to blacklist an address. You could just move and now the new owners can't use eBay.

Well that's really not a surprise since it is old hardware. I would go for something newer as that machine is a space heater. You can pickup used mini PCs or workstations with newer CPUs in them.

Well, this build is specifically for gaming with Libreboot so due to the limitations with the motherboard I'm stuck using the Xeon processor. Its not bad tbh runs everything well.

Assuming you're in the northern hemisphere: For this winter it's fine. It'll gently heat your home while you game like it's 1999. No worries 😁

However, once it starts to warm up you'll want to send that motherboard+RAM+CPU to your local HAZMAT trash pickup/facility and get something newer. Might I suggest a nice 2020-ish desktop CPU? With a motherboard that supports Coreboot, of course!

https://doc.coreboot.org/mainboard/index.html

...and get yourself a nice Nvidia (sadly, because AMD and Intel are still far behind) GPU with at least 12GB of VRAM so you can have fun with the open source AI stuff (it's a blast!). The more VRAM the better though so if you can pick up a 4060 Ti with 16GB cheap this spring that'll be your best budget buy (endless uncensored fun) 👍

Seriously: If you haven't got the hardware to run Stable Diffusion locally you're missing out! It's as fun and addicting as a really good game. Running it on some cloud service isn't the same because at best they'll be running stuff that's weeks or months out of date (which is like a million years in AI time) and they don't give you the same level of control/possibilities that you get when running your own stuff locally (run whatever models/LoRAs you want, whatever extensions you want, generating images without having to worry about overbearing censorship because it is that bad on public AI services--paid or not!).

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Define "everything". Everything installed?

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Your logic isn't sound, it's being "old hardware" doesn't necessarily mean it's reliability is degraded. Not on these time scales anyways.

Quality solid state hardware can continue operating as intended for many decades without degradation.

We really need to get on top of this sort of ewaste/consumerism centered thinking with better education and awareness to the actual reliability of hardware that wasn't built with planned obsolescence.

Well the RAM is bad so it apparently didn't last to long. Admittedly it can from eBay but the problem is older hardware is that it pulls extra power and is clunky.

It might be different if we were talking about something lower grade with a lower TDP but this hardware pulls a lot can can be defeated performance wise by a newer CPU that's only a few years old.

Nah that thing is using power like a space heater. The dude above is right, a mini pc for 180 bucks is faster and the power efficiency is not even comparable. Sometimes old stuff is like that; outdated and obsolete.

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DDR3 is a lot cheaper on Amazon.

The cost is having to support amazon though.

Yeah, it's not like making your life harder is going to kill Amazon, though. My lesbian co-worker and lesbian sister eat chik-fil-a sometimes for the same reason.

Amazon I can get why it's kinda unavoidable, but Chick-fil-A I can't. Are there no other restaurants in the area?

That's just you being weak and not sticking to your beliefs, I'd hate to be that pathetic.

There are innumerable ways to have stated this without coming off like an absolute cunt and maybe changed somebody’s mind.

Perhaps next time before you post ask yourself: am I trying to convince this person or trying to make myself feel better?

Idk, everything they do proves they are the enemy. Don't even pretend otherwise. Edit: you know the centralist criticism. That's it right there.

silicon power has had very good prices at azn for 8gb ddr3 dimms for awhile now. cheaper than what i've found anywhere else, even for used stuff or ebay when i've checked there. have several desktops here maxed-out on ram (16 or 32gb) from those.

Hey, at least they tested it.

I remember testing ram by compiling the Linux kernel. It was so resource intensive that it tended to use every block of memory, so if I was getting weird crashes or something I would just run a kernel build and see if I needed better diagnostics.

I found out about 2 months ago I had a dead stick because of my Arch install. I kept having data integrity problems and thought my NVMe was dying. And then the other drive was having the same issues. I had reinstalled Arch so many times during this that I memorized ALL the steps from start to end. I really wish I had tested RAM earlier, but was so determined to believe it was the drives.

At least you have a lot more experience with installing Arch now. Might be usefull when you want to install it on other PC's.

Yeah, I'm not a novice to Linux in general, but it was my first time using Arch. Was testing it out after many years of admin of Ubuntu servers and then trying OpenSUSE for gaming. I don't think I could ever leave Arch now, it's just so easy to maintain and I finally get the hype.

May I ask why you would prefer Arch over others?

I am not too familiar with Arch. It seems interesting to me to play around with it and follow a guide to set it up on one of my pc's.

Sure, Arch is very much a distro that you only will install what you want and none of the extras until you find a need. There's none of the extra bloat you get in most distros. And if you want to install something that isn't part of a distro package, you can install it via the Arch Users Repository (AUR) which has a combination of both binaries and source packages that will compile at install.

And most importantly all of that is easy to maintain, including the AUR using either pacman (the package manager) or yay (a wrapper for pacman that can update not only distro packages but anything in AUR). The worst part about installing projects manually is usually you have to do all the work of keeping it up to date, with but yay, it's just "yay", say yes a few times, and you're generally done for everything.