Memory upgrade not working as intended

krazymonkeys

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Jan 26, 2011
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Ok, I've been around computers for a number of years. I build my own, I work on my own. This, however, is something I have never seen before now. I am currently running on a budget gaming rig. Biostar A780L3L motherboard with AMD triple core 2.9 Ghz CPU, Gigabyte GV-685OC gfx card with onboard gfx disabled as it has always been, 500 Gb SATA HD. I was using 2x2Gb Wintec AMPX 1333 Mhz dual channel kit. I bought Gskill Sniper 2x4Gb 1600Mhz ram dual channel kit and installed it today. So far, I have double checked with CPUID and my BIOS and the timings are manually set to 1600 Mhz at 9-9-9-24 timings. 1600 Mhz is max RAM speed for my motherboard and 8Gb is max RAM so I know I am good there. I ran memtest86 for 2 hours with no issues whatsoever. Nothing is overclocked. Now on to the problem...when I was using the slower Wintec RAM with half the total amount, my PC ran much much faster. My Win 7 pro welcome screen lasted a total of 5-10 secs. Now, with double the ram at faster speeds, that screen takes almost 2 full minutes to disappear and my computer is just all around running like a snail. It takes anywhere from 20-30 seconds just to open Firefox when before it was nearly instantaneous. I'm at a loss. I have checked and done everything I know to do other than reinstalling Windows, which I was hoping to avoid. I have even reinstalled the old memory wondering if something was unseated while I was installing a case fan right before installing the memory but with the old memory, everything was fine.
 

krazymonkeys

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Jan 26, 2011
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Tried at 1333...runs about the same actually and running with a single stick, either one is just horrible. The system is stable with anything I do to it...just slow. Voltage for both AMPX and the Gskill Sniper are both 1.5 so no change there. The funny thing is when I game, everything runs fine. It takes longer to load, but once everything is loaded in a game it runs great. Better than before, actually.
 

krazymonkeys

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Jan 26, 2011
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Yea I'm beginning to think the same. I will try booting from a linux live cd I have that I am very familiar with the running characteristics of to see if it is the same for that. If it runs better I'll reinstall windows in the hopes that maybe something isn't updating with the new hardware. I appreciate your feedback on everything. I guess I was just hoping someone had a similar problem with the ram. Maybe advertised timings weren't very stable with some kits...things like that do happen but I figured the memtest86 would have shown that fairly quickly.
 
With case open you could have hit the heatsink on the CPU. What temps are you running?

Nothing memory related should give 2X change in performance. Memory speed jsut doesn't make that much difference.

WIN7 and VISTA have a great perfomance monitor. Open task manager, click performance tab, click 'resource manager' button. See if you are CPU bound or IO bound when you are being slow. See if your paging went crazy. Your performance is bad enough you ought to be able to see what is causing it.
 

krazymonkeys

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Jan 26, 2011
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Just an update. Tried the distro of linux and it ran great so I reinstalled windows and everything is fine now. Overclocked my system to higher cpu speeds than it was originally with no troubles at all. I am guessing it was something in the registry that refused to change with the ram upgrade. Not entirely sure but whatever the case it is working as it should be now. Thanks for all your input.