lost ram

[letulechuga]

I got a new setup today and out of the 8 gigs of ram that are recognized by the BIOS and Win 7, in windows I have only 3.12 usable ram. I checked the chips physically and the slots as Well, tried placing them into different slots and yet nothing works. The mobo is an Asus am3+ socket and I'm kind of dissapointed because I never had problems with boards from Asus. As always thank you for the help ahead of time AT.

 

[zir_blazer]

Are you using Windows 7 32 Bits or 64 Bits? 3.12 GB is around what you usually see on 32 Bits.

 

[DSF]

Specifically which Windows 7 OS is it?

Generally speaking, 32-bit OSes can only address 4GB of memory, so the computer gives the first .5-.75 gigs to the video memory and a few other things, and whatever's left it uses for the RAM. If you have more than 3.5GB of RAM a 32-bit OS is generally not going to be able to see it all.

 

[letulechuga]

Ah. Yea I got the 32bit win 7 ultimate. So going with the 64 bit version is the only solution?

 

[letulechuga]

The os still sees it tho, just says It's not usable.

 

[T_Yamamoto]

You need 64bit or it won't work.

 

[Ken g6]

Well, it's not the only way. There's this Ramdisk Plus thing that could let you use the rest of the RAM as a RAMdisk, maybe with a swapfile.

But that costs $80, and Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium costs $90AR. Almost certainly not worth it, unless there's some particular reason why you got Ultimate?

 

[letulechuga]

I see. Now one last final question is windows 8 is the same deal?

 

[aloser]

Yes - it's the same for all 32-bit OSes, not just Windows specifically.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yes - it's the same for all 32-bit OSes, not just Windows specifically.

Actually, that's not true. 32-bit Linux, with a PAE kernel, is also not limited to 4GB of RAM. Only Windows' client OSes that are 32-bit are limited to 4GB of RAM.

 

[mfenn]

The os still sees it tho, just says It's not usable.

It can tell that you have 8GB of RAM installed because it's reading the DMI information from the BIOS that says what slots are populated. A 32-bit OS (without PAE) cannot address more than 4 GB of memory though, no way around that.

But that costs $80, and Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium costs $90AR. Almost certainly not worth it, unless there's some particular reason why you got Ultimate?

You don't have to pay any extra to get 64-bit. All keys are valid for both 32-bit and 64-bit, and you can grab the media here.