PC finally broke down

[braincell]

Sell it on Ebay.

[valis]

Actually I find private forum trading much better than ebay, and if that's unopened RAM it'll be easy to sell. You might try posting it on the for sale forum here.

Also something I've noticed lacking here, elsewhere we use heatware and beerology to 'rate' transactions and 'traders to avoid' lists to know repeat offenders to avoid in 'for sale' forums elsewhere.

http://www.beerology.com/
http://www.heatware.com/

Here's my heatware:
http://www.heatware.com/eval.php?id=64138

[kylie]

Motherboards are so cheap, they ought to come with the RAM built into them. Maybe then we could avoid some problems.

if you suffer from bad ram after lets say 2 or 3 years (preferably the very moment you ran out of warranty) you wll have a hard time getting a replacement board that matches your cpu, so you either have to buy a new cpu in addition to your board or buy a whole package (cpu and ram pre-assembled). that would lead to fewer choices and a higher price, since you can't order the components from different retailers (or whoever offers you a good price), and the manufacturer would have to do all the validation for you.
one reason for cheap boards is that the tests what modules from which ram manufacturer fit best is left to the customer (although some manufacturers have short lists of memory they tested themselves against their boards).
the all-in-one integration concept works fine in the embedded market, but you can clearly see from their price lists that the mainstream market is not their target.

if I was to recommend a brand, it would be kingston value ram (KVR) for me. I started using these modules when I got my asus P3B-F long ago. never used any other brands ever since (and all those systems still run fine).

-greetings, markus-