Incompatibility Issue

[Guest]

I am currently builing a computer. All good stuff. Gigabyte GA-7DXR board (w/ onboard soundblaster audio), 2 Maxtor UDMA 7200 rpm hard drives (1=20GB, 1=40GB), 16X DVD, 16X10X40 CDRW, 1.4 T-bird Athlon CPU, 400w case, 2X 512K PC2100 266 DDR Micro ram sticks, Radeon 64mb DDR graphis card, Windows 98SE and fans galore. My problem is when I install the drivers for the graphics card, the system crashes with the blue screen of death. In troubleshooting the system I've found one temporary remedy. When I remove one of the sticks of ram (back to 512K) everything works great. The motherboard should support up to 3GB ram. Both the ram on board and on the graphic card are DDR. I've tried a different card (32mb Nvidia GeForce2 MX-200 w/ SDR ram). As soon as I installed the driver, I get the same problem. It will run fine on both sticks of ram and bare minimum windows driver graphics (16 color-640X480). I even tried Windows Me with no effect. It seems like I have a memory conflict. I have contacted Gigabyte, Micron-Crucial, Nvidia, Radeon, and several friends and they all scratch their heads at this one. I am thinking about unplugging each piece of hardware to see if that fixes the problem. I could really use some help here. I need the ram and graphis for the work I do. Thanks... Karlton Criswell

 

[Guest]

Not 100% sure, but could this be a buffer/unbuffered RAM issue?
I think some motherboards don't like more than 512MB unbuffered RAM, I think the Gigabyte is one of them.
Check the Gigabyte website, or the AMD 760 motherboard roundup on Tom's site.

 

[Jusphil]

isnt there something with win98 that makes it act funny with over 512MB ram?

check out the microsoft database here
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q253/9/12.asp?LN=EN-US&SD=gn&FR=0&qry=512 RAM&rnk=2&src=DHCS_MSPSS_gn_SRCH&SPR=W98SE

it says anything above 512 is useless to win98, SE, ME

 

[ejsmith2]

Isn't there something with Win98 that makes it act funny, *PERIOD*.


std::cout<<"I need a new OS."
std::cin>>Linux

<font color=blue>I hacked Msft, and all I got was this lousy source code.....</font color=blue>