Cerb

Elite Member
Aug 26, 2000
17,484
33
86
It's a symptom of worrying too much. I just checked my desktop, and it has 81MB reserved. Hardware reserved in large sizes (like a DIMM's size) can be a clue that you have bad RAM or an unsupported RAM configuration, but 100MB is fine.
 

Cerb

Elite Member
Aug 26, 2000
17,484
33
86
That I don't know. It's consistently higher than just a few MBs on newer systems, though. Probably UEFI's fault :).
 
Feb 25, 2011
16,992
1,620
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Reading around, it looks like that may be in reserve by a PCI-E device or something. Some people were saying sound cards, but *shrug*
 

HOSED

Senior member
Dec 30, 2013
658
1
0
76 MB here, Win 7 SP1 - When I hover over it says for BIOS and some drivers for other perphs. This is on an Asus G73JH ATI 5870 Card no integrated graphics
 

postmortemIA

Diamond Member
Jul 11, 2006
7,721
40
91
but it's the symptom of some dysfunction, and I want to know what the problem is.

No it is not, various device drivers will reserve system memory for their operation. Got sound card?
RAMMap utility should tell you if it is "driver locked", then that's what it us.
 

tcsenter

Lifer
Sep 7, 2001
18,896
553
126
I don't think hardware reserved is driver locked. Anything hardware reserved is going to be BIOS/firmware reserved.
 

shabby

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
5,782
45
91
I think 119MB is excessive, but I would have accepted it as 'normal' had it not been for the fact that the amount changed.

Just wait until you check the capacity of your ssd's and figure out they're not actually 256gb/512gb...
 
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zokudu

Diamond Member
Nov 11, 2009
4,364
1
81
589 MB Hardware Reserved here at work. Haven't a clue what it's reserved for but the machine is working great so I really don't even care.
 
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Techhog

Platinum Member
Sep 11, 2013
2,834
2
26
I have 8GB, 144MB reserved, and I don't even care. I don't see the big deal.

Windows 8.1 64-bit I should note.
 

Towermax

Senior member
Mar 19, 2006
448
0
71
31MB Hardware Reserved, out of 8GB of RAM, on Win 8.1 Pro 64-bit (The Z68 board in my sig.)