Sorry guys...i'm an amateur here so hope u guys dun mind if i ask a foolish question,so here goes....how do i update my graphics driver n run da memtest?

Neither did i say that you said that heh my post doesn't say anything about just limiting to ram. I was just talking about the game itself so i'm pretty much telling the thread starter that it might not be up to his system but the actual game itself. Really now, that wasn't even meant as a comment to go against yours in the first place, just something he should consider as well.

And no, not necessarily is it just the drivers. The game's graphical engine itself is not built on a very strong resource management system, much like Doom 3 when it first came out in comparison with Half-Life 2. They both have similar and comparable levels of detail but one runs noticably faster than the other. Same goes for the NeverWinter Nights 2 engine.

That may be true but the way you constructed your sentence made it sound as if Ram was the only thing that you needed, and i'm just mentioning that it doesn't go down to just that. I have a friend who owns a 6600 GT and yes, my X800 Pro does run faster than a 6600 GT, and your friend might just be using a driver revision that doesn't work well with the 6600 GTs. Also, FYI, i run my x700 Mobility on custom drivers, and I used universal widescreen patcher to get it to 1280x800 resolution.

Ah, but if you didn't read the many reviews up on the net about the performance of the x700 Mobility, you wouldn't know that its actually a very high performing card despite just being an x700. It runs Direct X9 Shader 2 games very respectably so possibly the only reason why i can think you run your Carbon slower than mine is that yours is set to Shader 3.0 where as mine is on Shader 2.

Anyway, back on topic. Sorry about that. To update your graphics driver, the normal way is to just head on to sites like either NGOHQ.com or Guru3d.com and in the downloads section, look for your card there as well as download the proper drivers for your OS, for e.g. Windows XP 32-bit drivers if you're running standard XP or 64 if you're running 64 XP, and so on so forth.

A good practice would be to run a driver cleaner program beforehand, like DriverHeaven's Driver Cleaner. You would uninstall the drivers normally in windows using Add/Remove Programs, then reboot into safe mode (by pressing the F8 key after the bios screen appears in most cases, then running the Driver Cleaner software and set it to clean either ATi or nVidia drivers depending on your card. What this does is if i'm not mistakened, cleans out any remaining files in your system related to the drivers, that help prevent problems when installing newer drivers on. You can then install the newer drivers when you reboot back into windows.

As for memtest, i'm sure you can get it on the web from a myriad of places, if not, if you have a linux disc sitting around in the house, its most likely got memtest in it. You would stick that into the cd-rom drive, reboot your computer then assuming you've set your computer to boot from the disc, be able to choose to run the memory test. Hope that has helped you.

You're right! I sound like I'm giving too much credit to the RAM when it's just a part of a complete set of components to game decently.

And again you are right about the x700, I haven't read many good things about it and I just let my self guide for the model #, but have no doubt that the custom drivers help a lot.

BTW memtest86 can be downloded here:
http://www.memtest86.com/

go to Free download and get the ISO image, and just burn it with any ISO burner like Nero, pop the disc in and let it boot from there, I usually run memtest for about 4-6 hours, so I could say just let it overnight and if you see no errors your memory is fine.

I still believe upgrading memory will be a smart move, not just for gaming but for the performance on every task, at least pop in another 512 stick

wow absolutely no sarcasm in your reply! i'm so proud you handled this so professionally. You should feel proud of yourself truly a role model to society.

And btw the topic was revived for this man

And not the original poster who posted his question on November 30th, 2007. I'm glad to see we're all paying attention and not blindly replying. I think with 3gb of ram, he doesn't really need to pop in another 512mb stick of ram. What do you think?

Back on topic, leprechaun85, have you tried checking whether it is an issue with Vista and Pro Street? Its still very highly probable that you have a faulty ram stick though. Good luck with your search.

I recognize when something I said didn't end up meaning what I really wanted to.

when I first read your post I thought you were the one being sarcastic, but when I read again.... I guess not....hope so..

I was replying to DERWY when I said add a 512 stick! he said he have a 512MB on the first post I know he haven't post in about 5 months but he never seem to have his problem solved if he's still getting messages from this thread he might be interested on reading it.

Of course 3GB is more than enough to play most of the games....actually to do anything you want,

Haha, i don't turn sarcastic without reason and trust me there was nothing to be sarcastic about in the first few posts. Rest assured i don't start anything unwarranted.

I doubt that the original thread starter will actually see this message now though, as 5 months is a long time and he's most likely got a new computer or at least upgraded already.

And yes, 3gb is plenty for vista and games these days, though 3gb is not really a standard number so i'm guessing its a 2gb and 1gb stick paired together. Also he might not be using custom hardware and possibly OEM builds like Dell or HP. I've heard that in some occasions adding rams that come from different manufacturers into the additional slots can cause issues but i'm not too sure about that.

It just boils down now to how and whether he managed to solve his issue. If not, it would be good to know if it WAS indeed a Dell machine or what not. Dell desktops can be pretty shoddy as i've used one at my past workplace before that had a board that didn't allow more than 2 USB devices plugged in at one time to start up. I found that rather retarded haha

Oh, those Hell... err, sorry..Dell PC's are well known for give you free headaches.

I think the 3GB comes with the excuse to push the limit on the 32-bit platform which as far as i know is the maximum supported, I don't like either a Laptop with 3 GB because I don't know how it perform with that setup, it's very likely the way you said, 2x1GB & 2x512MB because I don't think there are such thing as 1.5GB sticks right?

I think also he can check for the compatible cards list for pro street with EA, I remember my self trying to run True crime on my old 9600XT and it just keep sending me back to the desktop and a few times BSOD, a friend was able to run it on his old 9200 and I had better CPU and RAM, I remember I contact Activision and they told me the 9600XT wasn't compatible with their game.

what do you think? could the 8400GS be incompatible with Pro street? I think there's a slight chance but there is chance

Yes, i'm an owner of a dell inspiron 5150 and i've sent it back for servicing no less than 10 times in this few years of its lifespan..

As i'm aware, 3gb doesn't work with much advantage on 32 bit systems, and can only show their potential when you're running a 64 bit OS... though i could be wrong. I have a friend who has a laptop with 3GB hahaha 1x2gb 1x1gb, not to mention with an 8800M GTX... he runs xp though so perhaps he can feel the difference haha. And no, there is no such thing as single 1.5GB sticks

Well, with the 9600XT, i'm pretty sure it has issues with Direct x9.0c, being the old card that it is. That is at least what i read online, so that could be the possible reason why it kept returning it to the desktop, that and perhaps shoddy drivers. ATi has never been famous for their drivers unfortunately... I'm not sure what Activition told you but i NEVER ever contact game companies, they just tell you a pile of junk at times. My guess is that you had messed up drivers really.

the 8400 GS should be compatible with Pro steet, if not just look for driver updates or rollback to past working drivers. I've had issues where latest drivers didn't work with some games and caused graphical issues, and yes strangely enough to my ATi cards.

It will be interesting to see how a manufacturer will setup the ram on a 3GB system, I'm very curious about it, why? because anything over 2GB on a 32-bit system could lead to unwanted issues.

My old computer was a P4 3.4Ghz with ASUS Mobo P4P800E-Dx, using XP I put 4x1GB on it (I didn't know back then about the 32-bit limitation) and it recognizes only 3.25GB or ram, so I took out 1 GB and I keep using 3 GB, neither I knew that setup will bottleneck the speed of the ram because unpaired sticks are not able to take advantage of the DDR, so I rather took out another 1 GB stick and keep setup as 2x1GB as the performance was way much better, I'm not just talking about gaming

So, that's why I always suggest to have paired ram sticks, identically the same or at least same speed and memory to have a good performance on DDR.

Before I wouldn't believe it, but when I start benchmarking a few systems with Sandra I do believe how better is the performance working with paired sticks.

I've never actually quite seen a manufacturer offering 3gb OOTB. You'd probably have to go trough customising by yourself heh. I'm pretty sure you can't do that in the dell site as well haha

Yeah there is not much point in running more than 2gb in XP if you ask me, but its definitely a plus in vista or any other 64 bit system. Maybe even 32 vista runs well with over 2gb, i've not tried to know. My Old system was an AMD Athlon 3000+ on an Abit KV8-Po board if i'm not mistakened... had 2gb of ram in it but it performed very well, could even play Call Of Duty 4 with the occasional dip.

Regarding pairing ram sticks, thats why many manufactures now have "kits" so that you can actually make full use of dual channel DDR, if not if i'm not mistakened, you can pull up your computers specs in either CPU-Z or some other program and it'll display your ram as 1/2 is original like DDR 400 if you were using DDR2 800 ram.

It does help but from what i've seen the margin isn't really all that huge... i might be wrong though as those were old benchmarks. Hopefully my Patriot Extreme Performance 4-4-4-12 2x1GB kit DDR2 800 performs as well as i hope it would haha