Hi Guys, It appears black magic has but found it's wicked way into the darkest depths of the place which should not be visited! And behold, it shall but attept to thwart my great steam goliath! Basically, I ordered 8GB (2x4GB) of DDR3 Corsair XMS3 to go with the existing 4GB (2x2GB. When it arrived this afternoon (I almost tore the hand off the woman delivering it) I was straight up the stairs to try it out. Plugged them in, changed the settings and fired up windows. Back did I sit, but to revel in my glorious 12GB of RAM, only to find that looking up My Computer specs reported that 12GB was installed and only 2GB was available. Checking Hardware Monitor gave me that all of 10GB was taken up by "Reserved for Hardware". So, rising to the challange, I did but pull new shiny new 8GB from the system, leaving the 4GB in the primary memory slots. This gave the following results in HM: I then tried moving the 8GB to the primary slots, which reported the full 8GB as being present, and only 14MB being used for hardware. (Sorry, forgot to get a shot) Installing the 4GB kit in the secondary slots took me back up to 12GB, but even then only 4GB was useable. I then installed another 8GB kit, which I had purchased for a friend, thinking that the 4GB was the problem. Surely 16GB would register and work, I thought. Nope: So I removed the second 8GB kit and refitted the 4GB kit, and booted windows. This showed some improvement, and here is what the system sits at currently: Same configuration as above, but now up to 7GB of useable space..... It registers that there is 12GB of RAM, so I don't think there is a problem with the board, but just incase: MSI 990XA-GD55 Has anyone come across this before? Cheers Enterobsidian This isn't actually too far off me -
Please tell me you're running 64-bit Windows? Else that'll be the cause right there and then. That or you're using Windows Basic, anything from Home Premium supports 16GB, up to "unlimited" for Windows Ultimate. Basically; Windows 32 Bit can only address up to 4GB of system memory (There may be a work-around to double this. I don't know.), Anything over that and it has difficulty accessing it, simply because the addressing scheme isn't long enough for it to note down the memory locations. (Same issue IPv4 is running into), so it limits some off. Not sure if it outright ignores it, or just shows it as "Hardware Reserved", not had a 32Bit machine with more than 4GB of memory to test that.
Yes Windows & Professional, 64 bit. If It was 32 I would never have got 5GB of useable RAM. Cheers for pointing that out though, forgot to put it in! Cheers Enterobsidian
Hrm... Try starting the machine in Safe-Mode, see if the information is any different there, it may be a driver going "NO! I NEED ALL THE MEMORIES!" on normal startup.
are you running enough voltage through the sticks? Wrong, or too low volts could cause this quirky behaviour.
Theoretically possible, but last time I was undervolting RAM; I just got constant BSOD's from where the memory just couldn't function.
It's running 1.5v into 1.5v sticks of ram, I did wonder if that was a problem... Cheers Enterobsidian
If you see too many gigabytes in "Hardware reserved", then it is every time a hardware issue. That means one of the following options : - bent pins (this is typical to Intel boards, but you could have damaged one or more on AMD system as well) - overtightened CPU cooler, which bends the board - bad RAM modules - bad RAM contacts on either side of the DDR3 slot - not enough memory controller voltage, usually labeled Vtt (don't confuse it with the following item) - not enough memory voltage
Try 1.55V, it's little enough that it won't damage the modules, and enough to combat the vdroop that can occur when running a full four modules. Sounds like a remove everything, clean and re-build job it that doesn't work, though.
I had this kind of issue with my system when I built it, where only 4GB out of 8GB was available, other 4GB became hardware reserved. I swapped them around and made sure they were seated tightly and then I got the full 8GB Also make sure Hardware Remapping, or Memory Remapping whatever it's called in BIOS, is enabled too.
Give the CPU NB voltage a little bump if you have a Phenom II in there,this can help with 4 DIMM slots being populated.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned this, but it's more than likely from running unmatched sticks. Especially 2x2gb and 2x4gb. It can sometime be ok, sometimes.....
I have seen something similar to this before. One of my friends had about 2GB reserved out of 6GB. It turned out he had set the memory for the system to use to be maximum. You can check this in msconfig -> 'boot' tab -> advanced options. Make sure the maximum memory option is not checked, even if it is written out to the correct value for your system. I doubt it is the issue for you as it is something you have to set but though it was worth mentioning.
after 4 hours of gaming - with 8gb ram in my machine i still had 150mb of FREE ram - thats ram doing nothing at all.
I'd check the board can run that type of mixed RAM together and make sure the motherboard is configured correctly for that. Also like Truegamer said, make sure your BIOS is up to date. It's more than likely a hardware issue and not windows. This link may help you out though. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/978610/
But we are trying to fix a hardware problem, not "understand how Windows manages RAM". Or maybe i try to describe it better for you - OP had 4GB RAM. He inserted another 8GB RAM in his board. For hardware reasons, Windows (or any other OS) sees (can use) 2/4/7GB of RAM instead of 12GB. Free/Cached/Total/Available has nothing to do with the issue in this topic, we are trying to fix the "Hardware reserved" part.