Sorry your browser is not supported!

Hello, just have a few questions id love to get answered before i continue to buy a few cheap parts for my pc. Firstly, which is probably the most important right now:

My base PC only came with 2GB of RAM (2x1GB) and i had decided to upgrade it, someone gave me 3 extra sticks of RAM, totaling 3gb, however i only have 4 RAM slots in the pc meaning i could get a maximum of 4gb of RAM. And i had originally only put a single stick of RAM in which had brought the RAM in my PC up to 3gb. A few days afterwards i decided to use another stick of RAM and bring it up to 4gb, however when i turned my PC on, it said that 4gb of RAM had been installed, however i was getting very weird errors with my audio, basically any audio, regardless of whether it was played via speaker or headphone came out as a collection of high pitched squeals and crackles.

Naturally i took the RAM out thinking it was a RAM fault, however i gave it to my friend to try out, and it worked fine for him, just today i tried the other stick of RAM that i had lying about yet it has came back with the same audio error. The only thing that i can think of now is that there is a fault with the RAM slot on the motherboard itself, but i am no PC expert. Was wondering whether anybody here had any ideas that may help me out?

The second thing i needed some help with was getting a new CPU, however i really do not have a lot of money at the moment so i was aiming for the £60-£70 area, after searching for a while i found 2 promising CPU's from AMD. My problem was determining which would perform better, a 3.3gHz 3 core processor, or a 2.4gHz Quad Core processor, or maybe somebody had a good recommendation for me around that price band?

Thanks very much.

Perhaps you knocked the sound card out of it's mounting slightly when you were rooting around in the case? Best to just check everything else including the parts you didn't directly touch.

For the audio issue, when you removed the extra ram stick altogether the audio worked again? You only mentioned swapping the stick with another. It is possible the board isn't compatible with the other brand you have. The other possibility would be as you said, the slot is bad (I had that happen on a gigabyte board). If it works fine when you remove the new ram, swap the existing ram around to the other memory banks and see for sure if that bank is bad or not.

As odd as 3 cores sounds to me, I'd go with that only knowing the clock speed; assuming both CPUs you listed run the same cores. If not, then I'd need to know which cores they use then do research. What motherboard do you currently have?

According to this article, the triple-core is the same as the quad-core with one core disabled. At the same clock speed, the quad-core performs better, but what you listed have almost a 1GHz speed difference to take into consideration.
http://lly316.blogspot.com/2008/03/amd-phenom-benchmark-triple-core-8600.html

Yeah, as soon as removed the RAM, it worked fine again, and the RAM i am using is all the same brand. I will try fiddling around with the order to see if it is the bank.