RAM puzzlement

[berserkfan]

 I have an interesting problem. I was helping my friend with his old computer, and we found that he had only 1GB of RAM and was running win7. He had a pair of DDR2 RAM chips. There is nothing new installed on the computer; it just hadn't been used for a long time.

I thought it was a spoilt RAM of his, since the system would POST nasty beeps and not start up with one RAM chip if it was the only one in the slot. (The motherboard manual allows us to either put one, two or four chips into the slots.) But it turned out that my friend actually had 16GB RAM chips.

Now that's puzzling. How did his 16GB RAM chips, totalling 32GB for two chips, wind up being only recognized as 1GB in total? The system was working fine before he put it into storage after getting a new computer.

Furthermore, when I put in my own 4GB chips totalling 8GB, the system claimed I had 2GB of RAM only. Is there something wrong with this motherboard? How do I investigate this further? Bizarrely, I used memtest86 in a bootup USB drive to test the memory, and they found nothing wrong with the memory.

[Puddsy]

What mode does the system say it's running RAM in?

Did you try every slot, or just the same ones every time?

[dorkvader]

I bet the motherboard is bad.

I don't think they are actually 16gb DDR2 RAM sticks, I'm pretty sure there were never any 16gb ddr2 sticks made. even 16gb ddr3 sticks are really rare. I bet they were actually 1gb sticks. Sometimes it's really hard to tell from the label the capacity of the stick. If that's the case then it explains the behaviour especially if the ram slot on the MB is not working.

let me know if you get it working.

[tbc]

how are you checking the total amount of ram?

windows or bios?

[NeedAFix]

How often does he clean the case? Could be dust buildup, try a can of air or an air compressor.

The mobo is probably bad, look for a replacement.

Wouldn't hurt to just build a new PC though.

[heedpantsnow]

You can try cleaning the contacts on the ram with a pencil eraser. Try the computer with only one stick in the first slot. Try with each to make sure the ram isn't bad.

Make sure you are going by what the bios recognized and not the OS. If there is a discrepancy then use a Linux boot disk to make sure the OS isn't corrupted.

[Zeal]

As dorkvader said, single 16GB ram sticks didn't exist for DDR2, seeing as the maximum RAM possible at that time was 4x4GB. 16GB DDR3 RAM sticks only exist as ECC memory as well for server boards.

Could we get a picture of the sticks?

[berserkfan]

Everyone

A BIG THANK YOU for all your responses.

We have figured out that the problem lies in one of the RAM chips. And Dorkvader is right, I was thrown off by a 1GBx16 legend on the RAM chips' stickers. That actually means a 1GB RAM chip, with the memory spread out in 16 sub-chips.

Googling this code found on my friend's chip DDR2 667 (5) 1Gx16  it definitely refers to 1GB RAM! Googling 16GB DDR2 RAM doesn't get any results outside things like 2x8GB or 4x4GB.

So when one RAM chip out of a pair is dead, yes it means that my friend's computer was left with 1GB of RAM!

As for my own RAM chips, I checked and found they are indeed a pair or 1GB RAM. My own bad memory (pun intended) led me to mix them up with another pair of RAM chips totalling 8GB RAM currently in another computer.

Since issue is resolved, a big thank you again to everyone! I am locking the thread to show everything is solved!