I have purchased 3 sticks of Apacer ram in the past . I am running two sticks of 512 ddr in my main machine and 256 sdram in another.. I havent had any trouble with them at all...
speaking of blowing stuff up my aunt was having troulbe with a no video situation i reseated her video card turned the computer back on and the monitor started smoking big time. That Screwed up her video card and her monitor lol. this week everybody is blowing something up!
When I see something like that it seems to me that the chip was nicked. I have seen chips fry and most of the time they were dinged by something. The little flaw causes the chip to heatup and burn.