Added Ram; Hell broke loose.

Well my friends little brother bought some ram for his Alienware, and he asked me if I could install it, and of course I said yes. Well after I installed this ram (512 of HyperX) in addition to his current ram (I dont know the name 3-3-3-8) everything seemed to work well. But after a while of gaming and stability testing, the computer will randomly reboot. I went to cmos and changing anything would make you clear cmos everytime you booted. When you took the ram out, it was fine.

The computer is a A7N8X/2800+/X800Pro (Spoiled ) with a 400W 'Alienware' PSU.

Do you guys think that possibly adding that 1 more stick of ram is the breaking point of his PSU and that is causing the problems?

Thanks a lot.
-Andrew

Have you tried taking out the current ram and just running with the HyperX?

must be the ram. or the two different ram's not liking each other (even though that is not supposed to happen.)

but as suggested try running each stick seperatly, then each stick in each dimm slot to see if it maybe is the dimm slot which is buggered.

check the voltages in the bios
do a quick ram test with mem86 (or something along those lines)

When I added a stick of Kingston value ram to my system, it didn't play nice at all with the Mushkin that was already in there, until I traded the slots they were in...don't know why. It's not a dual channel board or anything.

I'd run memtest with the new stick only to make sure you didn't get a bad stick, then I'd make sure the board wasn't trying to run dual channel with mis-matched ram by placing them in differing slots like channel one slot one, and channel two slot one. Maybe the manual would have some advice here.

If it was bought with the idea of enabling dual channel, I don't think mis-matched sticks is the way to go...must have balance, Danielsan.
Try an e-mail to alienware about the problem if you can't get it solved, they may be able to shed more light on why it's happening, or what brand they use so a match is doable (if it's a dual channel problem).

Hope all comes out well.