Small 'thingies' broke off my ram.. repairable?

[niels007]

Hey all,

I got a 512meg pc133 stick for free, it was supposedly faulty. I installed it and it worked fine! not the fastest timings or fsb but it ran stable (memtest86)

Today i wanted to put my other ram back in (256 and 128) now that i was sure the 512 strip worked..

I took the 512 out, and saw a loose... resistor? capacitor? not sure what it is. They are about 2mm long and 1mm thick/deep, placed below / between each memory chip. I noticed 2 where missing (can see they have broken off) and the loose one came off as well. Now that there are 3 missing i keep getting ONE (lol) faulty address in memtest86 regardless of timings

I do have a small soldering iron, and since this was free.. I'm hoping to find out what parts are missing and if i can try to solder them back on.

Any ideas on what part it is, what it does etc?
See below url for an approximate pic of the missing bits..

http://picserver.student.utwente.nl/....php?id=492265

Regards,

Niels

PS: that pic says 'c' which probably means its a capacitor.. but what 'size' ?

[Nirvweezer]

if they work who cares..lol if memtest isnt stable it doesnt matter as long as its stable for what you do with your computer its fine

[notdrugged]

Originally posted by Nirvweezer on 11-16-2003 at 10:40 PM
if they work who cares..lol if memtest isnt stable it doesnt matter as long as its stable for what you do with your computer its fine

Personally I like a system to always be stable, and not jsut suddenly surprise me when I'm in the middle of something.

I would toss the RAM. You're just going to waste money messing with it. That stuff is too small for anyone to just hand-fix, even if you did get the right stuff to repair it.

[RichUK]

define stable

who is to say that because the memory is working that some other part wont fail?

[AntiNazi]

it is a resistor... have fun trying to soldier it back on... although if you can find out what resistance you need you may be able to get a more traditional resistor with the same properties on there... i have seen that pulled off...

[lazytech]

you can fix it

you just need an iron with a fine tip I filed mine to a sharp point.

if theres stillsolder on the pcb where it was just stick the tip of the iron to get that warm and soft then press the resistor onto it

then do the same with the other side, as ling as you dont connect the two sides its worth a try the worst that can happen is that youdont get good contact and its the same as it is now

[rth]

That is a surface mount capacitor and it's going to be tough to solder it back on, but it's possible. Sourcing the components will probably cost you more than the ram is worth since that's a quantity-buy part... I'd scrap it and cut my losses since one bad address is one too many

[Woz2000]

It could be 1 of 2 things. Resistors or Capacitors. Those are most likely capacitors.

The resisters (2 pin) are smaller than the capacitors. The 4 or 8 pins are resistors (except for the SPD rom). The resistors are usually all at the bottom just above the connector.

Capacitors are between the chips or on the top.

Resistors are ABOUT 22ohms and capacitors are ABOUT 220nF.

Soldering it back is not impossible, I have done finer soldering. Just practice (and take a cap off of) on a bad module if you can get one.

[memoryman]

It's a cap. I don't have the exact value, but this one goes between power and ground to buffer the noise in the power and ground lines.
If the wrong value is soldered into the circuit, the DIMM will not work any longer.
The value can be found through an extensive search at jedec.org,
looking for DDR module specifications.
Woz is right, you can use a cap off of an existing defective DDR module, but it must be one of the caps in the power-to-ground circuit.
There are other caps used near the center/middle of the module to balance the lack of capacitance for non-ECC modules and these caps have different values.. There are also caps tied to resistors and you don't want to use those either.

Buffalo Technology

[niels007]

Thanks people,

i've got 384 meg of fine ram so when i have some time i'll do some more research and who knows for a few euro(cents) worth of capacitor i'll be having 896meg

[memoryman]

One more little, but important thing....sometimes the RAM chips have two capacitors of different value associated with each chip. If this is the type of memory you have to take an extra cap from - don't. Use modules where the caps look exactly the same (size and color).

BT

[cartmanea]

If you don't wanna solder it you can stick it on with conductive pen ink, then put some super glue over it to be sure.

I'd definitely try fixing it rather than tossing it, but I'd just hold on to it, don't try selling.