Can extreme cold cause RAM to fail?

[Spazmatism]

Last night a window was left open in the room that my computer is in. It was probably around 15 degrees F outside that night, and the room had no vents or open doors. When I tried to get my computer out of sleep mode the following morning, it turned on, then a few seconds later it went off, then on again, and stayed on, but no BIOS or anything came on the screen. The same thing happened if I tried disconnecting power and rebooting again. The MemOK light was solid red. I tried using the MemOK button but what happened was strange. The computer turned off and on again as soon as I pressed down on the button, and the MemOK light began flashing slowly. It must had rebooted 15 times on its own, each time the light was flashing faster than the last, then finally the light went solid again.
Eventually I decided to just take one of the sticks of RAM out at a time and reboot, which showed that only one of the sticks was the problem, as the computer booted normally. The sticks I'm using are two 8gb Kingston HyperX's.
The only thing that I could think that would have possibly made the stick fail was how cold it was. Usually it's rarely that cold where I live and never that cold in that room.

 

[MeDoMiHD]

Most of the time, cold isn't the problem. Mkst of the time it happens cause of the humidity. If its really humid (if this is bad english just say i still need to learn some things) it works like you dip your stick in a bowl of water and try to dry it ( in a bowl of rice or something). It gets water damaged an sometimes wouldn't even turn on again. Some of de condense gets stuck in the stick. Higher chance when its cold, too. You are really lucky, but when it gets cold most of the time the air gets more humid. I live in Holland so I mostly know what im talking about. So just try not to leave your window open at such cold days

 

[Spazmatism]

Actually, the RAM stick didn't fail/is not bad. I just put it back in the same socket, and the PC boots up normally. So now I'm wondering why the heck it would have done this. The stick wasn't loose or anything.

 

[MeDoMiHD]

Actually, the RAM stick didn't fail/is not bad. I just put it back in the same socket, and the PC boots up normally. So now I'm wondering why the heck it would have done this. The stick wasn't loose or anything.

I was not supposed to say that yout RAM stick is bad but all eletronics, especially your pc components (everyone's pc components) are fragile and not so durable in humid areas. So this time (i think) it struck your RAM stick. It could have struck you cpu or graphics card or whatever. But i think it struck your RAM. Maybe it could have been something totally different but if it is the cold only, it would just boot up.
Humidity can damage some things in your computer. Wasn't the socket broken or is it really the stick?

But it had indeed something to do with the open window, im sure. Happy for you nothing really got permanently damaged.

 

[Tradesman1]

That can be common, when it got very cold, everything contracted as things do when the get cold, in effect it got 'loose' then when it warmed up it expanded (the metal), years back the expansion, contraction would cause what we clled 'chip creep' which was more common with Pinned chips that plug into a socket