I think I'm having compatability issues...

[Kyo Otaku 0]

Sorry to keep bothering everybody, but It occured to me that when I posted my second update to my first forum topic, I raised another. After looking at my motherboard's box, I realized that a few things on my system may be conflicting with eachother. However, I have no professional computer training, and very little hardware knowledge to correctly diagonose my problem.

When looking at the box, I noticed that my motherboard has a 266MHz system bus. Does that indicate that my bus speed is 2x?

Also, on the front of the box, it says it supports DDR SDRAM of 64/128 bits, but the manual contained a configuration for the two 256 sticks that I'm actually running in it.

It came witha nVidia GeForce2 integrated GPU, but as far as I know the computer is using the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra I installed during January of this year.

 

Looking at these things, I have three main questions:

 

My computer is only 2x, but the card I'm using requires 4x or 8x, so is that my main problem?

 

The RAM I'm using isn't listed on the front of the box but has a configuration chart in the manual, does that mean that it is ok to use it?

 

Is the old GPU somehow disrupting my new AGP slot card?

 

Thanks again for reading, and please post a reply if you have an answer to any of these three questions.

 

[Sampson 0]

It would probably be best if you were to list the Motherboard. It may just be the way I am reading the posting but you may be confusing the speed of the AGP with the Front Side Bus Speed. If your motherboard is really old, your AGP may only be 2X. If it is, your new video card will not work with a 2X board. I suspect that your AGP speed is probably not 2X, but you will need to go into your BIOS to disable your onboard video and have it default to AGP on boot up. To be on the safe side after bootup, you should remove the Nvidia drivers, reboot, and install the newest Nvidia drivers from their website.

[Kyo Otaku 0]

Thanks Sampson. After looking at your reply, I took out the motherboard's manual again to look through that before I tried to touch BIOS. After reading the AGP Specs, I discovered that my AGP Slot supports AGP 2.0 2x/4x. Also, after trying to remove the nvidia drivers, I noticed that my new graphics card is indeed the one that the computer is using. However, my question about the memory still stands. The manual says that its maximum memory is up to 1.5GB, and that it supports 128 bit system memory, but it says nothing about 256 cards, which I am currently running in it. The system recognizes that there is 512 MB RAM active on the computer, so I shouldn't have anything to worry about right?

 

[Kyo Otaku 0]

Oh, one more thing:

These are the hardware parts I use:

MSI Mainboard K7N420 Pro

Nvidia GeForce FX 5700 Ultra (By Verto)

Two 256 MB sticks of DDR SDRAM

A 160 GB Hard Drive

52x Max CD Rom Drive

Volcano 6cu CPU Fan

I run on windows XP Home Edition.

[Sampson 0]

Insofar as it is recognizing your 512gig of ram, you have no worries that the board recognizes both sticks. On the other hand, it does not mean that that there are not bad modules on the sticks. There are plenty of free ram testing software programs that can check the ram.

So, exactly what is the problem. Are you having intermittant reboots? Is your video card faltering?

[Kyo Otaku 0]

The Problem, in response to your response, Sampson, is that whenever I try to run a game on my computer, it will indeed play for a little while, but then it will catch itself in a loop and default to the error report. It ends in appcompat.txt, if that helps you help me in any way. I tried reinstalls of the games, but every single game installed doesn't work properly. Also, this problem only surfaced within the last month, well after I had made any modifications to my system other than windows updates. Could those somehow make EVERY game I have crash? Oh also, every once in a while the computer shuts itself into an immediate restart. The error file is something along the lines of Anthony~1\LOCALS~1\Minidump and some other stuff, but this happens very rarely. Thanks for all your help Sampson!