hey there have played a few games since last post, quake 4 on very high quality.
is working great untill there's a lot of action happening in a scene then it gets choppy again.
quake 4 is possibly not the best game to try out at present cos apparently it has some known compatibility issues with vista.
haven't noticed any myself the choppyness i get with any game with 4gb ram installed.

lately i've tryed upping voltages to ddr to 2.85 with trembly knees, and upping the ddr frequency to 233mhz worked great for 10 mins b4 it rebooted on me.

it wont boot atall at 250mhz. ballistix are capapble up to ddr 4000 (250mhz) btw have checked with cpu z.
so am feeling quite thick at present think i need to read a bios bible or something.
#

thx again for your time and inputs.
)

ok have removed 2gb of ram and managed to up the speed to 250mhz now the games are runnin a load smoother.
gettin a windows experience index of 5.2 with just the 2 gb. unlike the 4.8 i got with bios tweaked and a poor 4.2 without tweaking with 4gb.

really confused thought more ram the better but maybe not the case.
mobo takes up to 4gb but in manual says it'll drop speed to 333mhz with 4 gb (166mhz x 2) dont know if this can be bypassed by o'cing so probably gonna give up
sell ram
and
save for a striker extreme quad core system...
by the time i save for that we'll run outta oil
lol
:0

Hey Slip,

Looks like our Merlin isn't around at the mo. I'm going to send out a general request to our other Hardware Gurus, and see what they make of your scenario, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me that having twice as much RAM would slow you down like that.

Keep an eye out for their posts,

TTFN

LGW

Hey Slippy,

I'm not much of an overclocker but managed to find this reveiw about the board you have and there does seem to be an issue with ATI cards.
Other than that, have you upped the FSB speed as that could be a bottleneck for getting the data to/from the memory.
hope this helps

hi read review and it didn't mention ram probs was interesting though.

haven't changed fsb speed. have not seen that option in bios...may be called something else in my mobo... on my ai nos which is running in xp (my other partion) it says fsb is 1003 or something like that.
however have now changed my ai overclock option in bios to auto from 5% which i understand will make the necessary counter adjustments to any changes i make. (rightly or wrongly)
this has seemed to sort out probs with restarts playing quake 4, which i was experiencing after the memory speed increase to 250mhz.

all in all it seems to be running a lot better with just the 2gb ram installed just gutted to have £150 worth of ram on my sideboard laughing at me...

any suggestions & advice are welcome and thanks for your inputs thus far.