Ram causing system instability

[fenderboy15]

I have 2 sticks of VS256MB333 that came in a set together. I don't know if it is one of the sticks of both causing the problems. The motherboard I am using has an NFORCE 2 built in video card which uses a chunk of the system memory as video memory. Whenever I would try to run anything the least bit graphics intensive (like a movie or a screen saver) the system would lock up. For the few moments that the video would display there were intense visual artifacts. Not only that, but the computer would often freeze up randomly. I figured the problem might be RAM related so I switched the memory with 512mb from another computer of mine and the system ran fine. I have updated to the most recent BIOS and motherboard drivers and the problem still occurs. I am assuming I will need an RMA number.

 

-Aaron

[RAM GUY]

Can you tell me the make and model of MB you have along with the CPU speed and it’s FSB as well? In addition, please tell me the bios settings you have set for both CPU and memory and any performance settings that you may have set?

[fenderboy15]

Here are the requested specs:

 

Mother board - Biostar M7NCG PRO

CPU - Athlon XP 2000+ (I do not know the FSB...)

Bios settings:

- system performance - optimal

- FSB Frequency - 133

- CPU Ratio - Default

- memory frequency - By SPD

- FSB Spread Spectrum - 0.05%

- CPU thermal throttling - 50.0%

- video Ram cacheable

 

I believe these are still all the default BIOS settings. I have not done any peformance tweaking.

[RAM GUY]

Please set the memory frequency manually to DDR333 and set the Dim Voltage to 2.7 Volts if you have that option, then test the modules one at a time with http://www.memtest.org.