I definitely have a love/hate thing going on with my PC. On the love side, it's a 2500+ Athlon that I built from scratch myself and have tuned on and off for the last year. A new game, as frequently happens, has occasioned my updating certain components.
In the last couple of weeks I've added a new hard drive (provided free by my uncle the philanthropist), a new video card and a new CD-RW writer. I dug an old Plextor PX-708UF DVD burner out of storage and now it does most everything I want it to do.
But advancing in "Rise of Legends" the screen gets pretty busy and the complexity of the number of units being managed seems to challenger the process or video card somewhat. Hence the upgrade of the video card to something with 256Mb of RAM.
Mucking about with the memory, I realized it was only running at 266Mhz. Now, it's 400Mhz DDR ram so something was obviously quite wrong. Turns out that while my Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro motherboard has four slots, it can only manage three of them effectively. By fully populating all four slots I inadvertently lowered the memory speed. Pulling a DIMM increased my memory to the full 400Mhz.
Of course, to have as much RAM as I want, I now have to go out and buy a 1Gb stick.
The way I found out the cause? Cruising the FAQ at the Gigabyte Web site. Truly obscure.
Game runs much better with the 50% increase in memory speed. I am constantly reminded of why I love Macs - now if only I could play this game on my Mac.
Posted by artandscience at November 13, 2006 05:10 AM