strange problem: win7 shows 1.99gb of 4gb usable after plug in of sound card

[watchmen77777]

Ok, here are the details of my system:


CPU: I5 750
Motherboard: Biostar Tpower I55
Ram: Kingston DDR 3 2 x 2gb 1600MHZ
OS: windows 7 32 bit
Graphic card: 9600GSO SLI
Power supply: 800 Watts

(I am not installing 64bit because this machine is for games mainly)


Here is the problem:
there is one PCI slot left after SLI of 9600 GSO. as soon as I plug in the extrememusic card, win 7 will boot up and showing only 1.99gb of 4gb usable and my win 7 score for ram dropped from 7.6 to 5.5. even after install of driver it stays the same.



As soon as i remove the extrememusic card, win 7 boot up with 2.99gb of 4gb usable and score backs to 7.6


Here is what I did to troubleshoot:
1: Memory remapping in bios enbaled already.
2: Max memory in MSCONFIG already unchecked.
3: disabled onboard sound card.
4: ran Memtest on start up for two hours (no error).
5: thought of a bad PCI slot but if i plug in a PCI network card, it stays with 2.99gb usable.


any ideas or suggestions? thanks

 

[Absolution75]

Just use x64 windows... There is no dissadvantage to using it, only advantages.

Likely case is that there is memory on the soundcard that needs to be mapped. 4GB usable is for the entire system, which includes hard drive cache, sound card memory, video card memory, etc etc + a bunch of windows reserved stuff.

So, you can try to reclaim some of the ram, but in the end its not worth the trouble - just use 64bit windows.

 

[watchmen77777]

Just use x64 windows... There is no dissadvantage to using it, only advantages.

Likely case is that there is memory on the soundcard that needs to be mapped. 4GB usable is for the entire system, which includes hard drive cache, sound card memory, video card memory, etc etc + a bunch of windows reserved stuff.

So, you can try to reclaim some of the ram, but in the end its not worth the trouble - just use 64bit windows.

thanks. how do you remap sound card memory?
64 bit won't work for me since i play only games with this machine and doesn't want to deal with all the problems of 64bit with games such as NWN2 or some old games that just has problems running with 64bit.

 

[Absolution75]

thanks. how do you remap sound card memory?
64 bit won't work for me since i play only games with this machine and doesn't want to deal with all the problems of 64bit with games such as NWN2 or some old games that just has problems running with 64bit.

if they will run on windows 7 x86 (32bit), then they will run the same on windows 7 x64 as it runs the exact same code at the exact speed (it isn't exactly emulated, the cpu switches to 32bit mode).

the version of windows (64bit/32bit) won't have an effect on if you're games will run or not.


And I just launched NWN on my system - works fine . I think you were missinformed about 64bit windows. There aren't any compatibility issues really. I just played dark forces via dosbox through steam yesterday.