I have been tinkering this afternoon with my HTPC which is based around an Asus A85NX. I had it running Windows 7 fine for a month or so.

I decided to upgrade the video card and RAM.


Today I installed 2 X 1GB DDR Kingston PC3200 sticks in place of 2 X 256mb sticks. I left 2 further 2 X 256mb sticks in there giving me a total of 2.5GB RAM.

I also installed a Sapphire HD Radeon 6570 1GB DDR3 video card.

Now everything went fine, computer booted up, found new hardware etc. Screen res was showing as 1920X1080P which is correct for my HD LCD TV.

RAM was showing as 2.38GB or something similar in control panel and all was good.

Now I installed the new video card drivers off the supplied CD and they installed correctly. I did a reboot and Catalyst asked to update to a later version which I did.

This is where things went wrong, resulting in the BSOD.

Now I know what you are thinking, ATI drivers etc resulting in BSOD is fairly common.

OK so I try to reboot in safe mode to roll back drivers, won't do it. Try memory scan, picks up a fault.

I then tried removing the 256mb RAM sticks in case there was a clash with the newer RAM, won't even boot.

I have now removed the new RAM and put the old RAM back in and things are working again.

I would have thought if the new RAM was faulty or not compatible it would not have worked initially? Seems very strange to me that it only stopped working when I updated the Catalyst drivers. Unfortunately I don't have another desktop handy to test the RAM on.

Thoughts??