My fathers main computer has been running really slow for years. and so it s my main task to get his computer running at a decent speed again. We haven't really been on good speaking terms for years (mainly cause I left the church he brought me up in. The less said about that the better)

I was looking at his machine the other day anyway and noted that he he has been installing lost of software and probably has a few pieces of malware on his machine. lots of paging going on as the HD is audibly griding away swapping all day a clear bottle neck keeping his system running really slow. His machine has a 512mb pc3200 stick of ram no independent GPU a via K8m800 64mb slice of shared ram and so was like hey dad you should increase the RAM and so we went to the local PC store to up his RAM by 1GB only £22 not bad. got it back put it into the one remaining ram slot. but there is something wrong with graphics element of the machine now.

with both 512mb and 1gb sticks installed BIOS reports correct amount but stalls with red vertical dotted lines down screen after reporting storage devices and tries to read USB devices.

So I take out 512mb stick and leave in 1GB Stick. system will load but video cuts out once Windows has started to and all the other precesses start to load. Not ideal. I suspect there is a shared Ram conflict any ideas how to resolve this.

Motherboard is a Asus K8v-Mx

I would normally just disable the IGP and install a AGP based graphics card but don't think I have any spare and not sure I could convince him it would be a good idea having got him to pay out on a new stick of RAM.

What would you guys suggest?

Nice to be back.

Welcome to the forum.

Personally I'd start by running a memory test on the RAM. Could be a dodgy stick.

It's a really old machine so isn't worth spending any money on

so why would you check the memory first?

Graphic artefacts sounds like a memory problem, and the fact it only happens with the new stick re-enforces that.

I'd check the memory timings in the bios against the spec of the new stick, and try safer settings even if it looks OK.

By artefacts you mean the red vertical lines/ants when both modules are installed right?

How does that explain the behaviour when the 1GB stick is by itself?

Because the 1GB stick is probably faulty

I thought it was normally only the RAM when the cut outs were Random and unpredictable in nature.

Not always.

A lot of IGU's will allocate memory from a specific address range.
If a stick of RAM has a dodgy chip then it could be in that address range and cause the error.
Artefacts on a screen is nearly always memory related.

With both sticks installed wouldn't the IGU address the same address range in the working module and not show any signs of fault till much later?

Potentially but not guaranteed.

Have you got another stick to test with? Are both sticks the same speed & timings etc?

with shared memory for the GPU the system will use both ram chips using the same addresses on each chip
ie. 1x ram module onboard GPU addresses that chip at that memory location
2x ram modules the onboard GPU will share the memory allocation between both chips but using the same addresses on each chip for the amount of allocated memory for the GPU

it may be worth while checking the BIOS settings for the amount of RAM the onboard GPU uses, you may be able to increase this

also using 2 different size ram modules does not help. it would be best if both ram modules are the same size
both 512MB or both 1GB ram modules ...

I never got into the meat of what was causing the conflict cause I found a pair of 1gb pc3200 sticks lying around the office and installed them instead.

Took both his sticks and traded for the 2 1gb sticks.

I'll keep at him to buy an independent graphics card once he can afford it and before the buys a new vanity item.

I looked in the BIOS and I couldn't turn up shared memory any higher than 64Mb.


Thanks for your pointers once again.