I just bought a new ECS motherboard and AMD Athlon 64 3000+ chipset. The motherboard has a RAM capacity of 2GB. I have 2 sticks of 1GB RAM that is compatible with my mb. But I can only run my computer successfully when I have just one stick of ram in. When I try to use both at the same time, my computer freezes at or right after "Testing DMI pool port data..." Can someone help?

Try the sticks one at a time to determine whether it is the ram or not, and run a ram test on each chip individually. Once you have cleared the RAM, you will need to test the chip, as the chip you have has an on board memory controller and may be faulty. First of all you may want to try upgrading the BIOS, sometimes boards ship with annoying bugs like this.

I tested both sticks of mememory and they are fine. I upgraded the BIOS and I still get the same problem.

most probarbly the ram sticks are in conflict with eachother. With me it didn't freeze but it didn't detect one or the other. Try getting sticks of the same brand and see what happens!!

They are both the same brand. I have formulated a different hypothesis for my problem: Both sticks of RAM add up to slightly over 2 GB. Could this be causing my problem? And if so, how could I fix it?

If you mean because both stick have exactly 1024MB then no because that's totally normal. Any computer needs to calulate in the binary system becuase he only knows on and off which is shown as 1 or 0. Because of that your ram is calculates in exponents of two. So the possible Ram would be 1MB, 2MB, 4MB, ...., 256MB, 512MB, 1024MB (=1GB) and so on. Instead of 1000 thousand every kilo-, mega-, gigabyte and so on is calculated by 1024. So 1GB has 1024MB, 1048576KB and 1073741824 Byte! This is also the reason you never get the full capacity of your hard drives because the harddrive manufacturers calculate wit 1000 while the computer calculates again with 1024 and gets less MB and GB because of that!!! Check out the manual or the hompage of the manufacturer if there is a ram support table for your system. Check if there is a configuration with two 1GB modules in it and if there's something special about it. That way I found out that a Athlon64 winchester will run 4 double side ram modules (ram chips on both sides of the stick) only with 333MHz but 4 single sided modules at full speed with 400MHz!!!! Maybe you can borrow two 256Mb or 512MB sticks from a friend. If they have the same problem I'd guess either the mainboard or the cpu are faulty. My first guess would be the mainboard!

Just another thought: Your psu is good enough for that system ??? The additional neeed of power of the second ram may also cause a crash otherwise!