Please help. (thanks in advance)

Question

Ok, I recently got a new motherboard after my old one (a via based heap of poo) caused untold problems with my gfx card (crashes in games with agp enabled).
Now i set up the board, turned it on and played halo without fault for an hour great! so i start looking at my new boards features and enable mat and dot range,
but dont notice much of a difference. Then i realise that i have my ddr ram in slot 1 and 2 not 1 and 3 to enable duel channel mode. so i put that right,
turn on the system and nothing, windows starts to load and then i get a black screen and just the mouse. i turned off mat and dot range completely and now the pc
 works fine (just without the performance boost). if i set mat to fast, i can use windows but as soon as i do something complex ie start a game, the pc reboots.
i tried flashing the bios (i'm on 3.8) as its reporting high temperatures in the case (40 when idle, around 55 when under load) when my old main board had everything
at around 30 at idle and 45 under stress. but my file system is ntsc and i cant select the c: drive when in dos. (any ideas?) also, when i am running games,
i do get a bit of slowdown when i dont think i should be. now, im a poor student and can only reallyafford to buy one more (60-80 pound) upgrage so i want to find out
whats causing this bottleneck. i dont think its the gfx card as i can play through doom 3 fine (just a little choppy at times as ive said) and the processor never seems
to be having any problems according to task manager. i think its either my ram (as the crashes only start when duel mode is selected) or its the psu. (15.0a on the +12)
thing is, i could only afford to buy one or the other :/ any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Quote from: SatanMonkey on 14-March-05, 02:59:27
you know, everytime you look at a post and don't reply, god kills a kitten.
I hate kittens.
Actually (with respect to what Danny said), MAT will only affect bandwidth, which is well and good, but the way the benchmarks fall out, with all other things being equal, latency actually ends up having a greater impact on gaming than does bandwidth (I'll post a link to the article if I can figure out where I read this). The key words here, however, are "all other things being equal."  If, for example, you lower your timings in order to achieve a better overclock, it's likely that the extra bandwidth plus the extra clock cycles will more than counterbalance the latency, especially if you're running one of the new high-end GFX cards, which tend to be CPU bound until 1600x1200.