Ati Card And Ram Chip Weirdness...

I have an AMD 64 laptop and an ATI Mobility 9700 with SuSE 10. I bought an extra RAM chip from a guy at school and a few days later I noticed that none of my 3D accelerated games were working. I would get a Waring dialogue box that said no 3D was configured or available. I have spent the last week trying 8 different ways of installing the proprietary ATI drivers. Then it occured to my brother and me to take out the extra RAM chip just for the hell of it to see what happened.

Naturally, the 3D started working fine. I was dumbfounded and immediately started shuffling the chips around to see what's going on. My orgininal 512MB chip came with my Cyberpower laptop (I'll just call it the Cyberpower chip from now on) and the second is a 512MB Kingston. They are both 333 MHz DDR.

So with just the Cyberpower chip in:

1. 3D accleration works
2. Typing "fglrxinfo" at terminal shows ATI drivers working

With both the Cyberpower and the Kingston chips in:

1. 3D acceleration does not work
2. Typing "fglrxinfo" shows MESA drivers in operation
3. The drivers install just fine, I get the native resolution and all, just no 3D
4. The memory monitor (Kmenu->System->Monitor->Memory) shows the 1 GB of RAM

Where it got interesting is with just the KINGSTON RAM chip:

1. 3D works just fine
2. fglrxinfo shows ATI opengl working just fine
3. Everything works just the same as with only the Cyberpower chip

So this tells me that there is nothing immediately wrong with the new Kingston chip.

So my brother suggests that it could be a problem with having two different brands of RAM chip. I am personally stumped as to what the problem could be. I have no idea why this would affect 3D acceleration. My video card is a dedicated 9700 with 128MB.

Any ideas?

it could be due to the agp aperture, which calls on system memory when it needs it for 3d .
check in the bios to see what the settings are for agp & how much system memory it can call on if needed.
might be the answer

andy

it could be due to the agp aperture, which calls on system memory when it needs it for 3d .
check in the bios to see what the settings are for agp & how much system memory it can call on if needed.
might be the answer

andy
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I can't seem to find an AGP Aperture setting in my BIOS. A look around at some other message boards seems to confirm that I can not change it on my motherboard (my laptop is an Asus Z80k barebone).

Any other possibilities? This seems pretty weird to me...