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His love of PCs and their components was born out of trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the family computer. Tinkering with his own build at age 10 turned into building PCs for friends and family, fostering a passion that would ultimately take shape as a career path.

Besides being the first call for tech support for those close to him, Ty is a computer science student, with his focus being cloud computing and networking. He also competed in semi-pro Counter-Strike for 8 years, making him intimately familiar with everything to do with peripherals.

PC building is quite simple when you boil it down to its fundamentals. You have core components, and those core components really only go together one way. However, there are a lot of things in a PC build that can be done incorrectly without rendering the build completely non-functional, and RAM installation is closer to the former than the latter; you have to have the right standard of memory and put the sticks in the correct slots on your motherboard. Simple, right?

In the process of testing if you could game on one stick of RAM in 2025, I essentially reseated all 64 GB of DDR5-6000 in my system. What I thought was a pretty harmless change turned out to cause a whole host of bizarre issues, all of which were really unusual to diagnose.

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The symptoms were bizarre

Many different blue screens and random errors

For the first couple days, I honestly didn’t notice much. All 64 GB of memory was detected, and I was able to get through a whole day of work and play without any issues. But I had noticed something odd: when returning to my system after leaving it on overnight, it wouldn’t wake the displays at all. It seemed stuck or frozen, and initially I thought it may have been a display issue. I had experienced something similar before, but it ended up resolving with a driver reinstall. Not having time to diagnose it again, I just hit the reset button on my rig and everything worked just fine again. No big deal.

This is where the nightmares really began. I started experiencing really odd crashing with specific applications, usually my web browser. I would be watching a video or writing an article and the tab would completely crash. I initially figured it was a Chromium issue or some cache issue, so I dismissed it, and continued to just work around it. It didn’t crash frequently enough for it to matter, and the crashes weren’t triggered by anything specific, happening seemingly at random.

Shortly after that, the blue screens started appearing (or black screens, as they are in Windows 11). Complete system crashes, each with their own unique cause and memory identifier. The first one I wrote off as a fluke, but when it happened again for the second and third time mere seconds after booting into the OS, I knew something was wrong, and I had a feeling it was RAM related. Even when my system did successfully boot, Steam complained that the installation was corrupted, and EarTrumpet threw weird errors and wouldn’t start. Upon seeing this, I knew I had to get to the bottom of it now, otherwise more corruption could take place on my file system.

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The errors can send mixed signals

RAM issues can be finicky, and the errors that they throw in BSODs can be incredibly variable in their error codes. I saw 4 completely different error codes, each pointing to a different part of the OS. This can be very confusing for those new to PC hardware, but I knew as soon as I saw the 3rd unique error code, along with corrupting application installs, that this was a RAM issue. Since RAM is relied on for system boot as well as applications running at startup, a large enough error can be catastrophic for not just the system state, but also data stored on your non-volatile memory. The clue that tipped me off here, though, was the different error codes. Incorrectly installed RAM can fail in many different ways, leading to many different error codes, unlike issues with other components, which will usually throw one or two of the same errors repeatedly.

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The fix was simple

DDR5 can be extremely fragile in configuration

The fix was actually quite simple. When I built my PC, I used 2 kits of Crucial DDR5-6000 32 GB, totaling 64 GB. The kits are totally identical in spec, but were not purchased as one 64 GB kit.

As memory spec has become faster, the ability to mix brands and kits of different spec together has become more and more restrictive. You could get away with a lot in the DDR3 days, but DDR5 is really finicky when it comes to the configuration you use. I thought that this would be a non-issue for my situation, as the two kits I have are identical, but just as a sanity check, I decided to make sure the sticks were properly matched on each channel.

When inspecting my DIMMs, the batch codes were actually quite different for all of them, which made me even more confused. The only way I was able to tell which kit was which was by the print. One stick had slightly blurrier, bigger lettering, while the other kit had a much sharper script.

When I matched them up properly, and installed them in the correct corresponding memory channels, all of my problems instantly disappeared. BSODs were gone, all that weird Chromium tab crashing was gone, and I wasn’t seeing any corrupted applications. I was shocked that even within two kits of the same memory, the variance between them was just enough to cause issues when mixing them in a memory channel. This was happening at the JEDEC speeds as well, not just with EXPO enabled.

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A lesson in DDR5

DDR5 brings enormous gains in bandwidth and efficiency, but it also comes with far tighter margins than older memory standards ever did. Things that would have been harmless in the DDR3 or early DDR4 era, like casually mixing kits or not thinking about how sticks are paired across channels, can now manifest as deeply confusing, system-level problems that don’t immediately point back to RAM. I don’t think mixing different brand kits of DDR5 is ever a good idea, but even if they’re the same exact spec, pay attention to how you install it!