Visit of a Ram Testing Farm – Computex 2011

All of us one day have asked ourselves how do they actually make sure our favorite memory modules work on all these differents motherboards.

Well, we took a little break of computex fairground to take a quick look at how these companies actually do. So here is how it works:

Before being sold and shipped to our faraway countries, the memory vendors need to make sure that the assembled memory kit is capable to run on each plateforms and mainboard families that exist on todays market. The memory modules are going through a very specific testing cycle and they need to survive to all the criteria required by the testing protocol.

To make that happen, vendors have mainboard testing farms on which they run memtest with the installed modules. The memory modules are tested 2 by 2 or 3 by 3 depending on how the final kit will be packaged for the customers.

Each module is tested at the stock frequencies but some vendors sometimes also apply a more intensive testing cycle in which they raise the frequencies. So they can recognize the kits that can run higher and sell those at faster stock speeds.

The builders mostly run memtest or goldmemory under DOS and then again memtest directly from Windows. If the kit passes the test, the coolers are mounted on it and it is shipped to your favorite stores.