Laptop working with incompatible RAM??

mac3384

Long story short, 6 months ago I bought an Acer Aspire V3-771G-73614G1TMakk Ivy Bridge i7-3610QM with 16Gb RAM. The initial laptop had 4G Ram 1300 and the one I bought had 16Gb 1600 Corsair Vengeange (basically they removed the original ram and put their own). During first months, the laptop would periodically make problems, not booting on first start. Now after 6 months it wouldn't boot at all, it just starts and displays a white line in the top left side.

 

I sent it to service, and they said it's because the RAM memories are non-acer. Basically they told me they removed the 16 gb ram, put one of their own and it's working. Now my questions are:

 

1. Can a laptop actually run (for a while) if the RAM is not compatible? As the guys in the service said? If a RAM memory is not compatibile I would expect it not tu run at all or to run fine but on lower frequency if 1600 is too high.

2. If indeed this is the case, how exactly do I know if the RAM is compatible in case I want to buy different ones?

tux0topo

What you comment, is weird.

I suspect the 16gb stick was failling, and now don´t work at all.

 

Compatibilities problems can be happening, but is weird that fail completly after a time...

Why do you ask them to change them? why didn´t you do that? That was the actual problem. Now you must believe whatever they tell you...

 

Anyways...

 

Answering your questions:

1- Any pc can run with incompatible ram. But they give you some problems. Some BSOD, failing to boot (what you see now in your notebook), programs to fail working, etc... The lowering the frequency, is only available if you force it in some way, for example changing the bios configuration (not possible in our notebooks), or using a second memory with lower specs. The motherboard bios, read the capabilities of the memory, and use those to configure the system...

2- The compatibilities issues, are uncommon this days, so it´s hard to find them... which means they are hard to predict... Try to find someone else with similar configuration, and check what ram they have...