RAM Kit Warranty in 2026: One Dead Stick Takes the Pair With It

One module in your pair has started throwing errors, the other is fine, and the obvious move is to send back the dead one. Do that and you may get a module that will not run with the survivor — or nothing at all, because a RAM kit warranty is written against the kit, and two of the four makers we looked at require every module in it before they will look at a claim.

That costs real money in 2026. On the dearest of four matched pairs we priced at a memory maker’s own store tonight, the still-working module you post back is a $281.99 part; the cheapest single on the same shelf, if you need something to keep the machine running, is $137.99.

So we read the documents rather than the forums. G.Skill and Crucial (Micron) published procedures we could pull in full on November 1, 2026, and we searched both warranty texts for 13 ways of saying “the whole kit” without finding one — the requirement sits in a separate RMA document the ranking pages never quote. Here is what it asks of you, what it costs, and what to check first.

The warranted unit is the kit, not the stick

Start with where the rule is published, because that is the reason nobody quotes it. G.SKILL’s warranty policy never mentions kits coming back whole. We searched it for 13 phrasings — entire kit, complete kit, whole kit, all modules, kit must and in a kit, and more — and got nothing. The requirement is one page across, in the RMA policy and procedures, as a flat instruction:

Each sentence does separate work: the obligation, then the reason — modules are binned and validated as a set — then the sanction that closes the obvious workaround. Keep the survivor, send one module, and what comes back carries no compatibility promise.

Kingston is blunter: a kit “be returned in its entirety in order to be eligible for warranty” — a sentence we hold from our own read on 24 October, because kingston.com has refused plain requests on four consecutive nights and corsair.com on three. Micron’s Crucial terms are the contrast: they cover memory kits and never mention returning one whole, which is silence rather than permission.

The last column deserves reading twice. Both readable documents keep whatever arrives: “All products received by G.SKILL or G.SKILL associates for replacement becomes the property of G.SKILL”, and “Any product returned to Micron CPG shall become the property of Micron CPG”. You are not getting that specific object back — fine for the dead module, and the point of the next section for the live one.

What goes in the box, priced on a maker’s own shelf

Pricing the forfeit needs two numbers from one seller on one day: what a two-module kit costs, and what one module of that exact part costs alone. Crucial publishes both, so we read four matched pairs — eight product pages, all in stock, prices taken from each page’s own structured data.

The share column is the figure worth carrying away. The module that still works is 48.1% to 48.3% of what the kit cost, depending on the pair — never the clean half people assume, because the matched kit is dearer than two singles of the same part on all four pairs, by $10.01 to $22.01. We measured that premium from the buying side in our DDR5 CUDIMM pricing piece; here it only matters because it is why the forfeited half is worth slightly under 50% of the sticker.

Put the two together and a claim on a 2 × 32GB kit means posting $585.99 of hardware, insured at your expense, of which $281.99 was in working order when it left. In a market where the same part may not be in stock when the claim is assessed, that is the exposure — not the price of the module that failed.

Why keeping the good module is not the cheap option

The natural reaction to all this is to keep the working module, claim on the dead one, and buy a single to pair with the survivor later. The maker answers that directly in its own DRAM FAQ, under the question “I want to install more memory, in addition to my existing memory kit. What are my options?”:

That is the same engineering fact as the sanction in the RMA policy, said to a customer rather than to a claimant. Modules sold as a kit were validated together at the rated speed; two modules that merely share a model number were not. So the survivor is not worth its single-module price to you — it is worth that to a buyer who needs one stick, and rather less as half of a pair you are hoping will train.

So the arithmetic is simpler than it looks. Send the pair, lose the use of $281.99 of working hardware, get a validated pair back. Keep the survivor and you hold a module the maker will not vouch for in any untested combination, plus a claim with no compatibility promise attached. Neither is free; the first is defined.

The clock that runs while the machine has no memory

Both procedures start somewhere other than the maker: G.SKILL sends you to the original point of purchase for the first 30 days, Micron to the place of purchase for the first 30 days. That window matters, because a retailer swaps the kit where the maker repairs or replaces it, and a swap is days rather than weeks.

After it, the timings are the maker’s. G.SKILL asks for 7-10 business days after receipt, before shipping, and neither document promises a loan part or an advance replacement. With the pair in transit a single-DIMM machine is the only fallback, and the cheapest module on the shelf we read tonight for that job is $137.99.

Read that table as a cost sheet rather than a checklist. Postage and insurance on the full kit value, customs charges on the replacement coming back, the original packaging or something as good, and — on the Micron side — a 20% restocking fee if the inspection finds nothing wrong with what you sent. We looked at what a claim pays out in our read of five SSD warranty documents; this is the other half of the ledger, and it is all payable before anybody tests a module.

Your part number already says how many modules are covered

One useful thing the makers do publish plainly: the kit size is encoded in the model number, so you can tell what the warranty treats as one unit without finding the box. G.SKILL’s FAQ gives the full nomenclature. On DDR5 the digit after the channel letter is the module count, so F5-6000J3038F16GX2 is a two-module kit — our decoder reads it as 2. On DDR4 and older a letter does the same job: F4-3200C14Q-32GTZR is 4 modules, D is 2, T is 3.

Memory inside a prebuilt, and who owes you

PCWorld asked in February whether buying a prebuilt without memory and fitting your own leaves the system warranty intact, and left the question open. The mirror-image question — who covers the memory that came inside a prebuilt — now has a published answer, and it is not the one most buyers would assume.

G.SKILL’s warranty carries a separate disclosure for its U5-series modules, which it describes as “The U5-series (with model number that begin with "U5-") is a separate product line sold exclusively to system integrators; it is excluded from this retail warranty”. The coverage line is unambiguous:

So memory from that line is warranted to the company that built your machine, and your claim is against the builder on whatever terms the builder wrote. The retail warranty either side of it is gated too, if less dramatically: cover runs to “G.SKILL provides a limited warranty to the original purchaser only that any genuine G.SKILL hardware product purchased from an authorized G.SKILL reseller”, and where no valid receipt exists “if no valid proof of purchase exists, then the length of warranty shall begin from the date of manufacture (indicated by serial number)” — so a part that sat in a warehouse has already spent some of your term. The document names 5 things that do not count as proof, including receipts from any online auction websites, liquidators, or clearance houses and credit card statements.

What the pairs on our own shelf are worth tonight

Everything above is somebody else’s document or somebody else’s list price. This part is ours, and it renders from our database when you load the page rather than being typed into the article: the memory we track whose maker asks for the kit back whole, what it costs at retail right now, and what half of each parcel would be.

That is 7 of 12 tracked memory rows — 58.3% of the memory we watch — sold by makers whose published procedure asks for every module back. 7 of them carry a current observed price, and together they come to $3,618.94 of hardware that would travel at the holder’s expense and risk. The fourth column is simply half of each observed price: not a valuation, just the share of the parcel that was still working when it went in.

If you want to watch one of these before you buy it, the live RAM chart carries the same observations with their histories, and our RAM brand comparison covers how the same capacity prices across the makers quoted here.

Why a 2026 claim costs more than a 2024 one

There is a reason the forfeit is worth writing about this year rather than two years ago, and the makers have started saying it on their own support pages. The same notice appears on all three G.SKILL pages we read — the warranty, RMA policy and DRAM FAQ — attached to the question “Why has G.SKILL DRAM memory prices increased so much recently (since 2025 Q4)?”:

A warranty document is an odd place for a pricing bulletin, and that is what makes it evidence: the maker is telling claimants and buyers on the same page that the replacement cost of what they hold has moved. We track where it has moved to in our running account of RAM prices and the spot-price read.

Worth saying what we did not see, though. Of the 8 product pages behind the table above, 0 had moved since this site last read the same pages on October 28, 2026 — every list price was identical to the cent. A notice about a maker’s component costs is not the same thing as a storefront repricing, and on the one storefront we can read, nothing had happened in four days.

Five checks before you open a claim

None of that makes a kit a bad purchase. A validated pair is the right thing to buy for a dual-channel board, and the premium over two singles is small. It does mean the warranty you are getting is a warranty on a pair — worth knowing before one half of it fails, and worth pricing while both halves still work.

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