RAM not working properly :O

[guitar-HERO]

hi everyone.

lately i noticed problems while playing games. after a few minutes my frames would drop MAJORLY! im talking from around 100 down to 2 and 3 frames a second! :O so ive been looking into possible problems and along the way i found cpu-z, the program which gives you your computer stats etc. and i found that my RAM frequency is 250.0 Mhz with a max bandwidth of 266 Mhz.

i am puzzled by this because i have 1024mb DDR2 533 :$

i run a -
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+
Asus M2V-TVM
1024 DDR2 533
512 ATI Radeon X1600

can anyone help or at least shed some light on this? i looked in my bios for an option to change the frequency but came up with nothing.

thanks.

 

[pdyckman@comcas]

Yes. You see with DDR2 this is normal. DDR2 means dual data rate 2. Since your 533mhz is "dual data 2" it's split into 2 lanes of frequency. It's like a 2 lane highway. You've got data running twice at the same time. This gives you good performance because you have 2 streams of data working for you, instead of one. But it is at the cost of dividing the speed of your ram by 2. I don't know why you are getting only 250mhz instead of 266mhz. As far as your frame rate dropping that massively, that's a different situation. Does this only happen occasionally when the game is not hot and heavy but during periods of loading or other such stuff. If your frames went down to 2 or 3 per sec. during play, you would see a MAJOR change in the 'moving picture'.

 

[guitar-HERO]

ahhh ok. thanks for that. i never actually new what happened with ddr2.

hmmm... yes the framerate. it used to happen a lot. i would open up battlefield 2 and everything would be cool but after i had been playing for about 3-4 mins it would just go down to the 2 and 3 frames a second. the thing is, if i paused it and left it for say 5 mins, i would be able to play fine again for another few minutes. i thought that perhaps it was a power problem so i removed my second dvd drive, my internal modem and my floppy drive. everything worked fine for a while but now its back. i lag in much more simple games like frets on fire and trackmania nations.

oh and yes, it was a MAJOR change in the 'moving picture' if you could call it a moving picture....

got any ideas? should i invest in a new psu?

 

[Tedster]

frame rates are affected mostly by your graphics card and CPU. Ram has very little affect. Please read the gaming guide in the guides forum.