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I had a desktop PC which shares some parts with my current one. You don't want to know how it happened, but about three years ago I had some kind of blackout (or just fell asleep) on my desk and when I woke up, I was lying on my assembled PC which had its case opened.

The actual problem was that during my "sleeping state" I have lost some amount of my saliva, which dripped on the open mainboard. As far as I remember, I didn't hit the CPU or RAM-sticks or something like that, but anyway — it was impossible (after quick and dirty drying the main board) to start the PC — nothing started, as if it wasn't plugged in.

What did I do? After a recommendation of a friend who, in contrast to me, was more into Hardware (while I am definitely into Software), to get some 99.95% (or was it 98,99%) isopropanol from a local pharmacy (from a Chemist's perspective, refined alcohol barely contains any salts/electrolytes). I put the mainboard (After removing everything I could, i.e. RAM, CPU, cables, and after removing dried saliva manually with maximum care) into a kind of isopropanol-bath for a few days. Sadly, this didn't help even after completely drying it up.

Since then, I still have those two RAM-sticks (2x8GB), which have pretty nice stats for my financial conditions, DDR4-3200MHz or so. And the most painful was and is that those two sticks were used for about one, maximum for two years.

Well, I think that it's out of question that the sticks were dry for a very long time already; at least 2 years in very dry and safe conditions. But I haven't found anyone who was ready to try out my RAM even on their old machine.

Are there any safe ways to test whether the RAM-sticks are dead or not? Maybe even without booting a PC with it? I really don't know.

If there is no such possibility, how risky would it be to put them into the 2/4 empty slots and try to start the machine as if nothing happened? You see, my fear is of course that it could f.e. "kill" the rest of my machine and I have a relatively new PC (< 2 years old), there's even a RX6600 GFX-card attached to it which costed a lot of money for me plus Ryzen 5600 (no iGPU) as a CPU — I really don't want to loose any of the intact parts of it.

What would you do? Any recommendations or ideas?

About how to rescue them, as I want to be sure that those RAM-sticks are really dead before I have to sell them for 5-10€ and have to buy one pair of RAM again.

Ali Khakbaz
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SevenChalices
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1 Answers1

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Some points

  • A small amount of saliva for a short period is unlikely to have damaged them at all.
  • They are more likely to be damaged by continuously handling them, especially if you are standing on carpet or plastic/nylon. The static electricity generated is likely to make them walking wounded.
  • It is extremely unlikely that putting them in a system will damage the system. Put them in and boot up. If you hear any beeps from the bios then turn the power off. Search the manual for you bios to see what the beeps mean.
  • Do not use any electronic device to try and test them, it will almost certainly destroy them.
Rohit Gupta
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