Recently, I sold my less than 3-year-old PC to a friend. The system was in perfect working condition at the time. However, a few days post-sale, the PC started experiencing severe issues, including Windows failing to launch.
Upon investigation, I discovered that one of the RAM sticks was faulty. I removed the defective stick, leaving the system with 8GB of RAM instead of the original 16GB. After this, the system booted up normally and seemed to function as expected. I gave it back to my friend promising to get him a new kit.
However, my friend has recently reported that the system is experiencing performance issues again. While games run at a decent base framerate, there are constant FPS drops. Additionally, tabbing out of games causes the system to slow down significantly. Some games, including ones that are not resource-intensive like Overwatch, are practically unplayable due to severe frame-drops.
I’m trying to diagnose the issue and have a couple of theories. Could the remaining RAM stick have also gone bad? Is it common for two RAM sticks to fail simultaneously? Or could the system really be underperforming this much due to only having 8GB of RAM? Could there potentially be another issue at play, such as thermal throttling? He did report having dropped the PC from a few inches off the ground, so potentially that could have loosened the cooler.
My friend isn’t very tech-savvy, so I will be taking a closer look at the system myself. However if any of you have had a system be in a similar situation and know of any evident solutions, that'd be great. Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Upon investigation, I discovered that one of the RAM sticks was faulty. I removed the defective stick, leaving the system with 8GB of RAM instead of the original 16GB. After this, the system booted up normally and seemed to function as expected. I gave it back to my friend promising to get him a new kit.
However, my friend has recently reported that the system is experiencing performance issues again. While games run at a decent base framerate, there are constant FPS drops. Additionally, tabbing out of games causes the system to slow down significantly. Some games, including ones that are not resource-intensive like Overwatch, are practically unplayable due to severe frame-drops.
I’m trying to diagnose the issue and have a couple of theories. Could the remaining RAM stick have also gone bad? Is it common for two RAM sticks to fail simultaneously? Or could the system really be underperforming this much due to only having 8GB of RAM? Could there potentially be another issue at play, such as thermal throttling? He did report having dropped the PC from a few inches off the ground, so potentially that could have loosened the cooler.
My friend isn’t very tech-savvy, so I will be taking a closer look at the system myself. However if any of you have had a system be in a similar situation and know of any evident solutions, that'd be great. Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.