I bought myself an early Christmas gift and purchased a NeoLoch Inquisitor IC Testing System.  This tool gave me the ability to test RAM and PIAs.  Since I have a pile of both of these, this purchase seemed to make perfect sense.  Having bought an earlier version of the RAM tester and was ready to upgrade to the newer version with more capabilities than the old one.

The kit version is how I purchased the tester. It doesn’t bother me to take a little bit of time to assemble it and save a few dollars.  Each blade took about 15 minutes to put together and the main core assembly took about 45 minutes.  

This was a great investment and motivated me to test quite a few parts that I had laying around.  It also helped me organize some of the more common RAM that I had in different places.   

Inquisitor Core Module

This unit took the longest to put together.  The directions were clear and pretty straight forward to assembly.  The first power-on brought up the LCD, which was great to see. This means I assembled everything correctly.  

SRAM Blade (Static RAM blade)

All the blades took about 15-20 minutes to assemble.  This blade is used to 2114s and 2101s.  I was able to find a bad 2114 on my Thief board in a matter of seconds.  

PIA Blade

I had some PIAs that I wanted to test and most were bad, which I figured.  The test is easy to run and comes up fairly quickly.  The only way I could test PIAs before was replacing them in a board that works. This saves me quite a bit of time!

4116 Blade

This blade has already paid for itself.  I found 11 bad RAM on my Thief board along with many others in my pile of parts.  

Conclusion

This tool is a huge thumbs-up from me.  It’s easy to use and compact enough that it never leaves my work bench. If you have been on the fence about getting one, I would urge you to take the plunge.