Oxidized Memory Contacts

[rofl_my_waffle]

Well I was changing my liquid cooling fluid and adding a new waterblock. After everything was done my computer won't boot.

Narrowed it down to one stick of bad memory. It was part of a triple channel kit. Mushkin DDR3-2000Mhz.

The other sticks work. All the slots work. Just that particular stick doesn't.
I did notice however there was considerable oxidation on the contacts. The other two memory sticks have shiny gold contacts but the broken one lost all its lustre. I bet they cheaped out on the gold and used more copper than they should. But only on one stick seems weird.

Have this happened to anyone before. I think im going to RMA this.

 

[rofl_my_waffle]

I found a fix. Got a pair of scissors and started scratching some of the badly oxidized contacts. Now it works but kinda pissed Mushkin fucked up on the memory contacts.

I don't want to wait a month for an RMA either so I guess ill stick with it.

 

[EXT64]

I was about to suggest sanding. Did it oxidize while it was in the board, or did you have it out for a while? I have never seen that before, even on very old ram, so I imagine it was just a defective one.

 

[505090]

I bet they cheaped out on the gold and used more copper than they should.

gold plated contacts is more marketing than anything else, further contacts are plated with gold not made from a gold alloy

use a pencil eraser (those #2 pencils from elementary school work the best) to clean contacts in the future, removes all the oxidation easily and does not damage anything, scraping stand a high chance of going through the extremely thin contacts

 

[rofl_my_waffle]

No an eraser doesn't work at all. The densitiy of any metal, copper or gold is way way way higher than an eraser. Maybe after going through an entire eraser but not anytime soon.

A screw driver worked.

 

[505090]

actually you are removing the copper-oxide or gold-oxide that is on top of the copper or gold contact leaving as much of the original metal as possible. It's worked on thousands of contacts for me including pc's, automobiles, boats, commercial applications, and even on a multi-billion dollar sonar system (I learned that trick in the Navy actually). If you have more oxidation than an eraser can remove you need to address the problem of why your parts are oxidizing so bad.