Hello all,

I just purchased the Athlon 64 3200+ 2.2 GHz from newegg.com to replace my Athlon 64 3000. There was nothing wrong with the old chip, I just wanted to get an upgraded processor, that's all.

Anyway, the install went fine.

Then, when I turned on the computer for the first time, it took like 20 minutes to boot up!! During that time, just hitting the Windows key on the keyboard (and getting the Start Menu to pop up) took 2 - 3 minutes.

I went to Control Panel>System and I noticed something strange. It recognizes the new chip, but says I only have 256 MB (that's right Megabytes) of RAM. I actually have 2 GB of RAM. CPU-Z shows the RAM amount correctly.

I don't know what's going on. I'm posting this topic on my laptop since my desktop is all but unusable.

Some specs:

MoBoard: Gigabyte GA-K8N Pro (K8 Triton Series)
Video: PNY GeForce 6600 AGP8x 256 MB DDR
RAM: 2 GB

Can anyone help me out here?

Thanks!

Hey all,

I just switched back to my old chip and the RAM reads correctly on the boot up screen and the system works just like it always did.

What could be causing this? Did I purchase a bad chip?

Thanks.

It could be because the Heatsink was incorrectly installed and the Processor was using Thermal Throttling due to extreme temperatures, or a conflictive BIOS setting that could probabily have requiered resseting the BIOS via the Clear CMOS Jumper or upgrading the BIOS (Highly unprobable).
About the upgrade itself, it is ENTIRELY POINTLESS. 200 MHz are almost non noticeable (And easily overclockeable), but the 80-100 dollars that you have payed for the Processor are. I wouldn't suggest doing anything less than a moderate jump.

Thanks for the help Zir Blazer. You're probably right about doing the upgrade in the first place, but what the heck...what's done is done.