4 gigs of Ram present but 3 recognized

[Kul]

I have 4 gigs of OCZ Plat in my Asus A8NSli Deluxe MOBO. I also just installed Vista 64bit to take advantage of 4 gigs or ram. However, after installing the 64bit OS it still just recognizes 3 gigs. I then checked my BIOS settings and it tells me that i have 4 gigs installed but only 3 gigs are usable. Whats up?

[Vear Heart]

That seems a bit odd.

By the way congrats that post was your 600th!

[<RuReady>]

I also just installed Vista 64bit to take advantage of 4 gigs of ram

Did you Install SP1 for vista?

[Kul]

yes, i got SP1. But even during boot up in the hit Del to enter DOS menu it says " Memory - 3 Gigs OK( 4 gigs present)"

[GlacierFreeze]

SP2 for Vista?

[Kul]

SP2 for Vista?

Sorry. Replying to this post was the first thing I did after waking up. Apparently, I did not install SP1 yet and after I did it did show up as 4 gigs in the System Manager. However, the task manager still can only see 3070mb. I also noticed that Vista has a Ressource monitor which can display the number of Hard Faults/ sec of your ram. Mine sometimes jumps to 45, 70,170 and as high as 207 HF/sec. This cant be normal. I purchased two extra sticks of matching OCZ Platinum 3200 and it looks like I should have ran Memtest on them. I also noticed that for some reason when I start installing programs the memory usage increases linearly from approximatly 700mb on idle to almost 3 gigs. Thats strange. Boot up screen still says 3070mb ok ( 4gigs present)

[wonkanoby]

have a look in bios for some thing like memmory hole or memmory remapping

[supercat]

Some older motherboards have odd requirements for all four slots being used. Also, running Vista on an older board is taking a chance. I am running Vista Home Premium on a NF4 board, and it definitely has it's quirks. Double check the manual and what it says can be used and how to configure, and also see if maybe there is a newer BIOS you can update to, worth a try !

[Poci]

How many more devices do you have in system?

[Kul]

How many more devices do you have in system?

I think this rig is in my profile. Here is what I have in there:

Asus A8N Sli Deluxe
4x 1 gigs OCZ Platinum 3200
XFX 8800GT
X-Fi Xtream Music
400G WD SATA 2 HDD.
Antec 450W PSU

I'll contact Asus and see what they say.

[supercat]

Good idea, hope they can resolve it for you !

[wonkanoby]

on my A8N SLI PREMIUM

its on page 4.21 of manual re bios....dram over 4gb remapping

[Poci]

That used to happen to me on an older nf4 board,
4 gigz of physical memory but bios would recognize like 3.75

THen I remember adding xfi and it went down to 3.5

Conclusion was that that those devices were using the reserved memory.

[Brandito]

That used to happen to me on an older nf4 board,
4 gigz of physical memory but bios would recognize like 3.75

THen I remember adding xfi and it went down to 3.5

Conclusion was that that those devices were using the reserved memory.

that's only for 32bit operating systems.

like someone else mentioned, it may be a bios setting that needs to be switched.

[Kul]

what does remapping do? Also, whats is an acceptable number of hard faults per second? On idle i get up to 20 hard faults per second. When i was multi tasking and installing stuff i got up to 200 HFPS.

I installed vista ultimate to take advantage of 4 gigs of ram (and because i got it for free from Microsoft) but i'm starting to enjoy it. Should anything not work then i'll open up Virtual PC for Vista with my XP Pro install. Its a new shiny toy for me to play with.