My RAM just died and I notice some bubbling of the pastic around the DIMM socket

My (third-party) RAM on my X220 just died. At power on, I got a black LCD and a one beep followed by three beeps, followed by one beep.

I replaced the DIMM with the DIMM in the other socket (that is, in Lenovo terms, I moved the DIMM in slot b to slot a), which is how I'm typing this, albeit with 4GB instead of 8GB of memory.


When I removed the defective DIMM, I noticed that the green plastic in slot "a", beneath the top (that is, the end opposite the socket) of the DIMM was bubbled up. Could that have been caused by the DIMM running hot?

Will my CPU temperature go down now that I've only got 4GB of memory installed? I ask because the X220 (which typical runs hot) is running less hot under load than usual.

 

Bubbling usually means overheat and damaged component. I am not sure how the cooling structure exactly looks for the X220, but the decreased amount of ram shouldn't really lower the temps of the cpu by anything significant or even noticeable.

Yea sure if you have more than 4gb worth of applications running, odds are cpu is doing the work, so you can see it being hotter with the 8gb combo. But ceteris paribus, less amount of ram should not make cpu run cooler.

Only exception I could see for a few, maybe couple degrees at best is if the cooling structure is really horrible that one less electronic component (1 dimm of ram) contributes to overall less heat in the entire computer base. - But I doubt it will make any difference you could fundamentally measure.

 

That shouldn't have happened. The RAM shouldn't ever get that hot! Almost all 3rd party memory upgrades have lifetime warranties.

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