As RAM prices are skyrocketing, so are RAM scams on places like Facebook Marketplace, eBay, etc. I’ve seen a few people get burned, so I wanted to post this to educate people if you don’t know the difference between real sticks with actual RAM and Lighting Enhancement Kits. Lighting Enhancement Kits are great for those who want to populate all DIMM slots on their builds without having instability of running 4-8 sticks of real RAM. While this is great in that instance, people are using them to pass them off as real ram trying to make a quick buck. This is mainly going to focus on DDR5, but this applies to DDR4 as well.
DDR5 and DDR4 RAM has 288 contact pins, while Lighting Enhancement Kit sticks have 66 pins. In the first image I have both types of sticks side-by-side. As you can see all 288 contact pins are dense and close together on the real top stick, whereas the Lighting Enhancement Kit stick on the bottom has some spacing on the contact pins.
The labels are another way to differentiate between the two. The real stick has a longer model number with the capacity and CAS latency in it. The lighting Enhancement Kit stick has a shorter model number. The real stick also has the timings listed on the bottom of the label, the Lighting Enhancement Kit stick just has “[Dominator Titanium/Vengeance] Light Enhancement Kit”.
Everything else with the sticks are essentially the same as by design to seamless look like real RAM sticks in your system.
Just be careful when purchasing RAM from Facebook Marketplace, eBay, etc. Look at these differences as explained here.