Chaotic doesn't really mean unlawful in any context outside whichever games used it, does it?

As for Robin Hood, though, consider that he's stealing from the king who stands behind tax law to carry out mass debilitating theft on an entire country. Laws are only as ethically sound as the general public consensus on them - we can't say in absolute terms that breaking the law is never good.

And as for modern-day rich people, how about bankers who play the system, pay themselves handsome bonuses and then enjoy their luxuries while everyone in Greece is blocked from withdrawing any of their cash? Can you really assert that everyone should agree that every law-abiding rich person really deserves that money?

Morality is not so black and white. There's no such thing as universally "good" and universally "evil". They're subjective, and rarely if ever are they black and white. That's one of the problems with religion. It teaches people to judge things harshly without really being able to comprehend that it's more complicated than that.

Apples to oranges. I am not a very rich man. Also, Robin Hood never takes everything. He's taking a negligible amount. The rich wouldn't even feel it. It means nothing to the rich, but it means everything to the poor.

Did you test that same stick in different slots?

It's more likely RAM, however, in my recent case, it was my motherboard. Most CPU/mobo these days have two RAM channels (two DRAM controllers). When I changed a heatsink, my motherboard didn't have all the proper mounting screws and flexed a tiny bit when I put my memory back in. From then on, one channel had a bit error, which affected both of the slots for that memory channel. (Usually denoted by two slots of the same color. One pair black, one pair blue.)

It was a PITA to discover.

Had to buy a new motherboard.

New board works fine, but somewhat sadly, the audio chip layout is designed poorly and has constant low-volume noise/buzzing which is audible when I use headphones in silence.

I tested it again this morning in all four slots and it still returned errors. So I'm certain now it's the stick and not the slots.

Definitely. Thanks for the help.

On the subject of RAM, do you think it's worth upgrading from DDR3? I've never experienced DDR3 being a bottleneck, so I'm not sure whether or not the improvements of DDR4 or DDR5 would warrant the added cost.

Yeah, I know that. I'm thinking about the future though.

Edit:
So some games that used to crash on me now play perfectly fine since removing my bad RAM. Most notably, I've been able to play DOOM (2016) again recently. I'm blown away by how good DOOM looks.

DDR4 has almost zero speed upgrade from DDR3 in games. We're talking less than 1 FPS, in benchmarks I've seen.

Get whatever is cheap. Get lots of RAM. But don't worry about "fast" RAM.

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Note the top two lines.

... new motherboard... and new CPU. Memory controllers are on CPU now. Ryzen is DDR4. FX is DDR3. You can't swap.

It's possible certain Intel chipsets support both (have two sets of memory controllers). But meh, the performance gain is near ZERO, and DDR4 costs INSANE prices these days. Like $400 for 32GB. (I paid $100 for 32GB of DDR3.) And memory prices have been going up like crazy the last few years. (At least 2X up for DDR4 in two years.)

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That's the entire point.

If you can't even get 1 FPS, it doesn't matter. You're not going to notice a 5.23 vs 5.15 hour zip/movie transcoding. You're not going to notice 1 FPS. DDR3 vs 4 doesn't matter for 99% of use cases.

Modern systems aren't RAM speed limited... they're RAM latency limited.

Even 7zip won't change:

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If I'm paying more that twice the price I better be getting more than 1% of !%#@ing improvement.

Eventually, DDR4 will be cheaper for larger sizes. It was the same way with DDR2 vs DDR3. DDR2 was almost as fast, but DDR3 eventually became cheaper to get larger and larger sizes of RAM so it eventually switched over to being more price-effective.

But currently? DDR4 is years from becoming competitive in terms GB of RAM or in terms of performance.

So if you want to throw money away, throw it into a better CPU or videocard. But higher DRAM speeds rarely yield anything because all they do is increase the latency and clock higher so their effective latency is around the same:

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And that's from crucial... the memory manufacturer. They list multiple DDR4 modules that are effectively slower than DDR3's!

So only gaming FPS is important. Think database and high traffic web servers. Don't be so narrow minded.

I don't give a shit about 7-zip extraction, it's more than fast enough as it is.

It might not do your average joe much good, but to say DDR4 is not worth it, well not for you, but maybe for other people it is. Servers need to have fast access to memory caches of files and databases. That's pretty much a given.

And since when did servers extract 7z files for you?

Okay, what, that's not good enough? I have to explain myself further?

What about audio and video processing and encoding? What about people working with gigantic 3d terrain files? It could be worth it for them. You're so quick to dismiss me, but what he said was making a lot of assumptions. I point them out, and now I get told I need to take a chill pill. Real time loading of textures? Re-uploading bitmaps to the GPU upon demand? The list could go on, but why.

If you're talking to me, you're either joking, or not reading my comments. DDR4 isn't worse, it's the same thing with a higher density. It costs more now but will cost less per GB later as manufacturers ramp up production. It's the exact same thing that happened with DDR2 when DDR3 came on. Eventually, it will be cheaper to get huge sizes of DDR4 than equally large sizes of DDR3--but not now. Buy whatever CPU/videocard/etc you want. But buy it for the hardware and let the RAM be a secondary decision.

Edgar: I've provided amble evidence. Over and over. MEMORY LATENCY is the bottleneck and DDR4 is the same latency.

Video encoding:

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And here's a page on JUST DDR3 vs DDR4. EVERY BENCHMARK IS THE SAME. Games. Video encoding. Zips. And the whole beginning of the article explains why... latency.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700k-6600k-ddr4-ddr3-ipc-6th-generation/7

So unless you can actually provide evidence to back up your claims, I don't really need to respond anymore. I've provided both empirical evidence, and theoretical (latency) for why it doesn't matter. And you've responded with "Nuh-uh!"

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"Memory latency continues to be a critical bottleneck."

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"Oh look, the latency is the same."