Mech is AMD Duron 1.2GHz, GeForce 2 64MB RAM MX400 64bit, FSB 100MHz. MB is MSI's K7T266.

For the long time I had an chunk of 256 DDR RAM which worked on 266MHz (that is its maximum) with latency 2.5.
Recently I've added a new chunk of RAM DDR 256MB/400MHz to my mech.

These two now work on 200MHz wiht latency 2.

Now the problems I face are following:

- If I simultanely start some game which should work fine (Max Payne for instance) and SoundForge 8.0 to record sound, the system is unable to breath under the operations of rendering the scene (static) and recording sound. Separated, both work fine.

- More interesting thing happens when I run Unreal Tournament (the older one). When I start it, the game renders very slow on 800x600x16. FPS is under 0.5. If I change resolution to 800x600x32 and then return it to 800x600x16 it start to work fine.

Before I added the new chunk of memory and downed memory speed it all worked fine. Switching desktop between 16/32bit makes no difference. Mech gets 1173marks on 3DMark 2001 SE currently.

Does someone have idea how to fix this crap? (as I belive it can be fixed)
I got 18hrs to solve or explain this (to myself).

try running your new stick of RAM by itself and see if you get similar effects...you may have a flawed piece of RAM.

Other than that, mixing and matching RAM is usually a bad idea. Supposedly all that happens is it runs at the speed of the slower RAM (as you expect), but I've never done it. There may be other negative effects too.

Personally, what you describe makes little sense unless either the RAM is bad or the motherboard/windows can't handle the RAM mismatch

Either:

1) Get a better paid job so you dont need to stinge on shit systems.

2) Get a job of relevant tech development and make the changes yourself, for the good of all.

3) Throw you system out of you window and shout to the top of your voice: "Rock and Roll!".

In addition to the offtopic from the previous post, I'll note an interesting "play of numbers" after Satis' last post. It is about the number of posts on the attached image.

I will try what you suggest, Sat but as far as I understand you, there is probably no other cure that to get an other chunk of RAM which will be the same speed as the new or old one.

I am accepting further suggestions too in meantime.

hah...you are easily amused, sir.

Basically, yea... chances are that, whatever's going on, is at some low level that you're not going to be able to remedy. I don't know if your computer is capable of DDR, but if it is, I know I can buy 1GB of DDR for around $50. Your PC may be too old for that, however, in which case you're screwed. Sorry.

If you have 3 memory slots, you can also play around with what memory is in what slot. When strange things happen, strange things can fix it.

I may have mentioned how I was moving a pair of RAM sticks from one box to antoher. They were 2 256MB chips and were running together in my main box for a long time. I replaced them with better/bigger/faster RAM and tried to move the pair to another box.

One chip worked fine. either chip worked fine. But if I put both together, the other box wouldn't work properly. They worked fine on the primary in tandem. Why? Beats the crap out of me. Probably something at the chip level...something with the chips and the memory controllers and the chipset, but who knows. Whatever it was, it wasn't fixable, so I had to work around it.

Funny... sometimes it happens that board even do not realize that there are two chunks of DDR and use just one, ignoring the other. This is not about how they are ordered in slots.