PC help
Turbo Mini Forums

Does anyone have any ideas why my pc would show that it has 512mb of RAM and a 1.1ghz processor in it, when in fact it has 1.5 GB of RAM and a 2.4ghz processor.

I am running XP home edition sp2 and it has shown the correct setup before.

Cheers Matt.

some pc's throttle down when they get too hot. as for ram - one of your sticks might have died.

you're close to me, bring it round if you want - RG26.

Are you Seeing this in Windows (properties)?? or in the BIOS ?

Maybe you've had a stick of ram die and its reset (fail safe) the bios which may explain the under clock of 1.1ghz.

Try removing your memory one stick at a time and see if you can find a problem stick. I Guessing you have a 1Gig and a 512 stick and its the 1gig thats died.

Hope this helps

Edited by Mirage on 10th Jan, 2008.

what processor & memory are you running?

The RAM side of it is showing incorrect in the properties and in the BIOS but the processor speed is only shown incorrectly the properties side of it as far as I am aware. (I do not see the processor speed shown in the POST and never have since I bought the PC)

I have just replaced one of the original 512mb sticks with two 1Gb sticks and I am also using one of the original 512mb sticks. (So it is in fact 2.5Gb, not 1.5Gb of RAM)

The problem was there though before I replaced these sticks.

Motherboard is an ASUS A7n8x, processor is AMD Athlon XP 3200 and the memory is DDR400 PC3200.

I'd run just your 2 1gig sticks. put 1 in the slot on its own and 1 in one of the pair of slots. You get dual channel memory control like this.

You need to go into your bios to check that the memory settings are ok and see what the multiplier is set to for your processor. Should be 11 x 200 for your processor. pressing del at startup should get you ino bios.

Right I have solved the problem with the processor speed, just changed the CPU external frequency from 100Mhz to 200Mhz, no idea why it went to 1.1ghz though as I have not touched these settings before.

The RAM is still a problem though, changed the sticks around and both the new ones will not work at all (the PC will not even boot up it just beeps).

The original sticks once put back in place now show 1Gb again, (could this have been dust that caused it to show only 512mb of RAM)?

Now I tried putting the new sticks in with the original memory but it seems to just ignore them (dodgy sticks, even though both new)?

Something else I noticed in the BIOS was the FSB spread spectrum was set to 0.5%, I changed it to the other setting of 1% but it made no difference so I changed it back. Any ideas what this does?

Cheers for the help so far guys.