A loooong time ago, I gave a friend my old Dell XPS Studio 7100 that I turned into a pseudo gaming computer. It had 5 gigs at a time (Keep in mind this was during the time when everyone was saying 4 was all you needed for gaming)
I had the 3 gigs that came with the computer, 1 2gig stick and 1 1gig stick, both generic I don't know the model offhand as I don't have access to the computer. I then added two 1gig sticks of gskill pc3-10700 RAM, Part number F3-10666cl8-1gbhk
A few years later, games start to become more demanding so I got him two 4gig sticks of PNY RAM that was the same frequency and timing, so that paired with the gskill brought it to 10gb total.
Everything was working. No compatibility issues at all. Then about a year after adding the RAM, he gets a 4 beep code when he boots the computer. For Dell that's a RAM issue.
I went over his house to diagnose it. The generic sticks that came with the dell do not boot the computer, the PNY sticks do not boot the computer, however the Gskill sticks do boot.
I tried numerous times to get the gskill to work in tandum with the pny, or at least get the PNY working by itself since that was 8 gigs - but absolutely no combination of ram worked at all except for the gskill by itself.
The problem is that even though it boots, the gskill is only two 1gig sticks and as you can imagine there's not very much you can do with a 2 gig computer these days.
Unfortunately the BIOS has extremely limited options, and nothing regarding RAM whatsoever.
I find it extremely unlikely that both of the PNY sticks and the generic dell sticks all died at the same time while they were previously working.
The gskill RAM works in either busses. There's 4 slots in total, and I tried loading with them both in the first channel, and both in the second channel at seperate boots. No matter what combination, it always booted with the gskill.
So since I can verify that each ram slot is working, what would make the computer all of the sudden reject all other RAM that it had previously ran with issue free?
My personal guess would be the motherboard itself is on its way out, which isn't a "huge" issue as he had planned on getting a new motherboard when tax returns come along - but I would like to get his current computer up and running so he at least has something to use in the mean time.
He's running windows 8.1, and I'm not sure the exact motherboard - just the stock one that comes prebuilt with the xps 7100
Any thoughts would be appreciated, thanks.