RAM capacity situation makes no sense

T

tealshift

New Member
I used System Info for Windows to look at my motherboard's RAM situation, and saw this:
maximum capacity: 8192 MB
slots: 2

I thought, great! I'll upgrade from 4 to 8 gigs (2 x 4GB).

So i did. And after booting back up, everything seemed fine until i tried pushing that extra memory by running several intensive applications.
The RAM meter only approached 50%! I thought it was some driver problem, but then I found that RAM doesn't need a driver.

Finally, I go back to SIW and look at the RAM situation again. This is what I missed:
maximum memory module size: 2048 MB

WTF? If it only has 2 slots, each holding a max of 2048, How the CRAP can the maximum capacity be 8 gigs!?
 
it's probably that the chipset supports up to 8gb's, but each slot can only have 2, and the manufacturer, since i'm guessing this is a store bought, used crappier components to make it cheaper and left out 2 of the slots.
 
jonnyp11 said:
it's probably that the chipset supports up to 8gb's, but each slot can only have 2, and the manufacturer, since i'm guessing this is a store bought, used crappier components to make it cheaper and left out 2 of the slots.
Click to expand...

No.

It's a chipset limitation. The other parts of the board plus the CPU might be able to support that, but the chipset on the board is limiting your capacity. If 8GB was totally unsupported, you'd likely not get past the system POST (power on self test).

OP you should be glad that it even boots. You can try the following though:

Hit start, tye "msconfig" without the quotes and hit enter. Hit the boot tab and go to advanced options. Make sure that the "maxmem" option is unchecked. If it's checked, un check it, hit apply, and reboot. Then check your memory capacity.
 
claptonman said:
Are you using a 32-bit or 64-bit version of windows?
Click to expand...

I think he is using 64 bit, for one reason: For 32-bit, the world ends at 4096 megabytes. Simply can't see anything further. Unless MS made 32bit large address aware, it would only detect 4GB and say x amount usable.
 
linkin said:
I think he is using 64 bit, for one reason: For 32-bit, the world ends at 4096 megabytes. Simply can't see anything further. Unless MS made 32bit large address aware, it would only detect 4GB and say x amount usable.
Click to expand...

Yes, I realize this, but I was thinking that if he was using 32-bit and used SIW, it could only see 2048mb from each slot, since it can only address that much. Just a precautionary, since if he has 32-bit, no point in getting 8GB.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top