Spent years testing RAM with one stick, rookie showed me my mistake

I used to always test RAM by pulling all but one stick and running MemTest86. Did that for maybe 6 years on every build. Then last Tuesday a new guy at the shop asked why I wasn't testing them in pairs. I thought he was just green. Turns out some motherboards have memory channel quirks that only show when both slots are populated, and I had been sending out systems with flaky dual channel configs. He ran a stress test on a machine I had already cleared, and it crashed in 10 minutes. Has anyone else had a basic assumption like that get blown up by someone with less experience? What was yours?

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parker_campbell6d ago

Man that stings because you did everything right by the book and still got burned. Idk, it makes you wonder how many other "rules" in this trade are just stuff we all copied from each other without ever checking. Good on you for actually listening to the new guy though, a lot of people would've just brushed him off.

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