What are the chances?!

kylew · 24 Oct 2008 at 11:22

At my office, we just bought 6 kits of OCZ 4GB 6400 from OCUK, and 5 out of the 6 kits don't work and just results in the computer beeping until I turn it off.

I work in a small architectural drawing office. We've got 6 Dell Precision 380 Workstations. The first set I tried resulted in the beeping, the second set just worked. Every other set and I get beeping.

The one working set of RAM works in the other computers though, so I can't think of anything else other than the RAM being faulty, but 5 out of 6 sets?

I think I'll take them home tonight and try them in my computers to see if they act the same.

What are the chances of getting this many dead on arrivals? Maybe it's a faulty batch possibly?

Any ideas? Thanks

kylew · 24 Oct 2008 at 15:12

*Cough* [echoes]

No ideas?

TheOtherOption · 24 Oct 2008 at 15:18

Ouch, unlucky! I bought one of those kits earlier in the week and it's been fine up until now *touch wood*

Don't know about the odds of that many bad kits in one purchase but I would agree a bad batch is most likely to blame.

Chris1712 · 24 Oct 2008 at 18:59

Could be that the Dell motherboard boots with 1.8v or so to the ram, and its not enough for the OCZ sticks. One of em just happens to be a higher spec'd pair that dont need the higher volts for stability.

kylew · 24 Oct 2008 at 19:03

Chris1712 said:
Could be that the Dell motherboard boots with 1.8v or so to the ram, and its not enough for the OCZ sticks. One of em just happens to be a higher spec'd pair that dont need the higher volts for stability.

I'd considered that since it says 1.9V on the RAM modules itself, but but it says on the OCZ site that they're 1.8v, and as far as I know, 1.8 is the spec for DDR2.

On the modules, it has the timings and then the 1.9v which I assumed to be the voltage needed for those timings and overclocking possibly?

Rroff · 24 Oct 2008 at 20:52

THe SPD for them should boot at 1.8v

Bit weird tho that 5 out of 6 kits are faulty - have you tried sticks individually to see if its both or just one stick in a set?

I'd be tempted to blame dell - I tried to upgrade some of them at the job previous to the one I have now and had similiar problems and it came down to them not liking high density RAM or something like that.

Might wanna check BIOS versions on the PCs and see if one of them is running a newer BIOS that fixes it or something.

^JP^ · 24 Oct 2008 at 20:56

I have the same kit in one of my PCs (got it on Thursday after seeing the deal) and it would not boot until I put it on 2.1v.