Is my motherboard bottlenecking my RAM?

[Sonikku]

I have a rather outdated ABIT AMD Socket A micro MOBO with a gig of Corsair Value RAM in it's only two slots.

My system is telling me I have a total of 1048040k memory. (I take it about the gig I installed)
Yet it says it only has 734756k (About 734mb) available. I'm running Windows XP with not much of any programs active. Does XP usualy take up about 300mb in general system use or is it really limited to 768mb with 38mb going to system use? I'm curious because I play a lot of World of Warcraft and I need all the ram I can get when there are a lot of people on screen at once.

My specs are:

Abit Micro MOBO
Socket A Sempron 2400+
1 gig of Corsair Value ram (in two sticks with 2.5 cas latency)
9600XT video card

 

[PurdueRy]

That sounds reasonable

 

[stevty2889]

Yep, thats about right. My X2 rig sitting idle right now is using 233mb of ram, this one with IE open, and yahoo and AIM running is using 309mb.

 

[Sonikku]

I know someone who has a dell running XP with 256mb of ram. I don't know how he does it.

 

[Googer]

Certain BIOS' will limit the amout of RAM a system can have installed. It is not too uncommon for desktop motherboards to have a 512MB or 768MB memory address limitation. What is the model of ABIT motherboard that you have?

 

[Sonikku]

It's the VA-20 Micro Socket A version. Do I need to update the bios from my initial boot up? I was never really comfortable on the whole bios update thing...

 

[ub3rnewb]

Originally posted by: Sonikku
I know someone who has a dell running XP with 256mb of ram. I don't know how he does it.

That's nothing, I have a laptop running XP with a Pentium 3 @ 600MHz with 128MB of RAM.

 

[mordantmonkey]

Originally posted by: ub3rnewb

Originally posted by: Sonikku
I know someone who has a dell running XP with 256mb of ram. I don't know how he does it.

That's nothing, I have a laptop running XP with a Pentium 3 @ 600MHz with 128MB of RAM.

your poor HD...