Thursday, August 27th 2026
Buyer Finds DDR4 Memory Chips in a DDR5 Kingston Fury RAM Stick
In a time when DDR5 memory prices keep soaring to unprecedented levels, we have seen consumers resort to older DDR4 memory, but not like this. X user @watagjt shared an unusual experience with a DDR5 memory stick that contained no DDR5 memory chips inside. The memory stick, seemingly from Kingston, reportedly had DDR4 memory chips soldered onto the PCB instead, making it clear that it wasn't a regular purchase. According to the buyer, the Kingston FURY Beast DDR5 module was bought unopened, with no visible damage, and its heatsink and label looked normal at first glance.
The teardown, however, revealed a messy soldering job with flux residue and unused PCB pads, leading the buyer to suspect the swap. Interestingly, the DDR4 chips themselves showed valid DDR5 identifiers, which made the swap even more convincing. Of course, what makes this scam deeply concerning is that it is impossible to spot without disassembling the stick, and even then, a trained eye is needed to make the conclusion. The advice for buyers is to stick with brand-new or trusted used components, and never purchase anything from a suspicious third-party vendor.
Source:
Watagjt on X
The teardown, however, revealed a messy soldering job with flux residue and unused PCB pads, leading the buyer to suspect the swap. Interestingly, the DDR4 chips themselves showed valid DDR5 identifiers, which made the swap even more convincing. Of course, what makes this scam deeply concerning is that it is impossible to spot without disassembling the stick, and even then, a trained eye is needed to make the conclusion. The advice for buyers is to stick with brand-new or trusted used components, and never purchase anything from a suspicious third-party vendor.
16 Comments on Buyer Finds DDR4 Memory Chips in a DDR5 Kingston Fury RAM Stick
I would think that it would be throwing errors left and right, assuming it even ran at all, which is highly doubtful and I also wonder if the SPD was reprogrammed, or what it was reporting
Something is missing, did they desolder it with a hot air machine?
Something does not add up or some information is missing. Or i do not see it.
tofu boxes and login required, but the Source, last picture indicates clearly, someone desoldered it with a hot air machine and checked the footprint of the desoldered part with the pcb footprint.
i doubt many end users have the knowledge or a working hot air machine. it is not a trained eye, you see it clearly when you desolder it. I wonder why would you desolder a DRAM stick in the first place?
You've confirmed it would work, now.
the voltage is not even remotely the same, that DIMM would smoke, and not to mention the DDR5 mobos work completely differently with RAM, the chips couldn't even communicate correctly "as is", not to mention the signal issues
so the only way I see this even booting is to have dummy DDR4 chips that are physically on, but electrically disconnected, except for 1 real DDR5 chip, but as soon as the system tries to access the memory it would BSOD or worse
The voltage and timings are all controlled by the processor, which reads the SPD on the RAM for guidance. If the DDR4 connected to the RAM slot identifies itself as 1.2V DDR4, then that's what the CPU is going to run it at. You can't run a DDR4 stick in a DDR5 slot or vice-versa, since the pins in the two different types of slots have different pinouts but if someone designs and builds a PCB to route the correct pinouts for a DDR5 to the correct contacts on DDR4, there's no reason why it wouldn't work.
It's quite a high-level scam, if it works, since you need to be able to make (simple) PCBs but that is nothing the counterfeiting rings haven't done a thousand times before.
Obviously if someone puts this in a board with Arrow Lake, Zen4, or Zen5, it's a non-starter - those CPUs aren't compatible with DDR4 at all.
On the other hand, the Kingston module from the news post is a scam. The only thing on it that works is the SPD, and it presents the module as DDR5. You need another module, one that actually works, to run anything (an OS, a memory tester, anything) on the system, and read and display what's in the SPD.
This has led me to an interesting thought. When the CPU powers up, RAM is inoperable. The memory controllers have yet to be configured, and link training (when necessary) must be performed. This means that the CPU can run and execute code even if its only RAM is its cache. Does that seem plausible?