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I recently revived an old PC running an Athlon II X2 260 on a ASUS E5248_M4A77T motherboard with 4Gb of Corsair 1333Mhz DDR3 memory (2 x 2Gb - TW3X4G1333C9D).
I installed Mint 19.2 Cinnamon and added an additional 8GB of Non ECC ram (from Micron) - also DDR3 1333 for a total of 12Gb.
It seemed to run fine - everything seemed to work until I tried to start VLC and Media Player.
The logs showed coredumps and neither programme would run.
Nothing in the MB manual gives me a clue to the incompatibility. The new memory is installed in the first bank which is dual channel. The manual states that memory in the second bank will be single channel.
Could this be the problem?
I would like to increase the memory count but it seems that it's not a worthwhile investment.
Can anyone suggest why this problem has happened?

Does the new RAM you added have the same timings as the old? Are the timings (as shown on the sticks) showing in the bios? If you mix ram and don't match the timings, I seem to remember strange things happening unless you slow the timings on the faster sticks to match the slower ones. Been a while though since I've messed with anything like that, as nowadays I just use XMP profiles...

I didn't check the timings of the new RAM; The Corsair stuff shows 9-9-9-24 which I assume are the timings.
I'll have to shut the PC down and pull the ram to check - thanks for the tip, I hadn't thought that timings in different banks would be an issue.
PC is running fine now that I pulled out the Corsair stuff.
I should have said that I installed the 64bit version of Mint.

Asrael wrote: ⤴Thu Nov 07, 2019 4:50 pm
PC is running fine now that I pulled out the Corsair stuff.

There you have it. The next trick would be to put the Corsair stuff back in, and remove the other. If that works, try them all together again. If it falls over again, you'll have your answer. Almost certainly mixing RAM is your issue. You might get away with having the different RAM sticks on different channels, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Decided to take a chance and added a further 8 Gb of memory in the second bank with the same timings and it works perfectly.
Thanks for the advice. I'm caching Firefox to Ram now to preserve my somewhat older (in technology terms) SSD after following some advice on the Easy Linux Tips Project blog.