Mislabeled Memory, Damage, or Fraud?

[novicetechie]

Hi,

Last year I bought a set of OCZ2G8004GK, its a 4 gb kit you can find from newegg or mwave.com. For the past year I've been using windows xp pro, a 32 bit OS so I thought the fact it displayed 3gb of ram was completely normal.

Recently though I upgraded to WIndows 7 Pro (X64) and still only saw 3gb of ram. After hours experimenting with settings in bios and on the hardware, I decided just to test each stick, 1 @ a time. To my surprise stick#1 of the 2 set, really only had 1 gb of ram.

I thought it was a mistake. Could they have possibly given me a defective piece of memory, or were they intentionally trying to commit fraud by selling 3gb kits under the guise of 4gb kits (under the assumption that most users have 32 bit OS's)?



My bigger question is in safety. The OCZ2G8004GK was suppose to function as DDr2, and to my understanding thats suppose to be matching pairs. All this time (a year) I've been using 3gb of what I thought was DDR2, but turns out the sticks don't match and 1 stick was actually less than the other. Is this okay? If uneven pairs of ddr2 are installed does it revert to DDR?

 

[Lmeow]

Well, DDR2 and DDR are not backwards compatible, the RAM would probably run at the same speeds, considering they are the same except the memory module size. As for the memory, they either mis-packaged it, or possibly some of the RAM chips are dead, I wouldn't really know. However I doubt that they intended to sell 4GB kits as 3GB, because they'd get sued by the many who were building new computers and using 64-bit O/S etc.

 

[novicetechie]

I was thinking about the possibility that the chip had "dead" components, but it reported a full 1024 gb of ram when I plugged it in. It led me to believe it was just mislabeled.

Still pretty frustrating considering I just finished installing windows 7 (x64).

Do you think any of the data that passed through the RAM itself was corrupted?

 

[deweycd]

Again this is hard to tell, the best way to know if there is something wrong with your memeory is to run a program called Memtest. It will tell you if the memory has been damaged and if data passing through it may become corrupt.

 

[novicetechie]

Will do. I just burned the ISO Memtest+ and I'm gonna leave it running for about 5 hours.

Question though.

Most mobos have 4 slots for memory & usually to take advantage of dual channel u have to correspond them in the right order. This entire time I thought I was in dual channel mode, because I had both chips under the proper formation. I guess I was wrong since 1 stick was less than the other.

What mode would a motherboard go in by default if there's 2 DDR2, but they're of uneven sizes - even if both are in the proper dual channel formation? WOuld it just revert to the slowest speed ? Does it make a difference if its in Unganged Mode?

 

[novicetechie]

I just ran memtest (v3.5) (original not memtest+) for 6:30 hours. Both memory were detected. Stick 1 is still only reading for 1gb, so I'm concluding that they mispackaged my Kit.

But both memory modules came out error free after 8 complete tests addressing every possible memory range.

So is it safe to assume its safe to use the memory until I can get a real set of 4gb?