Applications Showing Less Ram Than Installed

cthulhuiscool

cthulhuiscool

2[H]4U
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Mar 15, 2006
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Just noticed something and wanted to see if it is an issue at all.
I have 12gb of ram installed into my computer, and I recently noticed steam and system requirements lab view it as 7.7gb. CPUz and windows system tab see it as the correct 12gb, I was just wondering why other things see it as less and if that is anything to be concerned about.

Just noticed, in the system tab of control panel it says only 7.5gb of ram usable. Common sense would say that the mobo is compatible with just 8gb or something, but the thing is I've have 12gb for several months now and only just noticed this.
 
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Have you looked up your motherboard specs to verify what capacity it supports?

Could this have been going on this whole time and you never noticed? I'd you want to eliminate ram modules being bad, try your system with one module at a time, see if one doesn't work
 
ya it's looking like that may well be the case, I have a total of 3 sticks laying around and tried alternating them and had the same limit. Odd that I never noticed it though.
 
scratch that, I wasn't looking closely. I just threw in a 2gb stick to replace the 4 (it was 4 and 8 before) and now it reads as 9.5 available (i believe 512mb is reserved for the apu so i dont care about that. I'll try playing around some more but it may be my 4gb stick that is bad

Edit: I moved the sticks around to different slots and now I'm getting 11gb usable, but I've ha not other issues. Does this tell you anything? Is there to way to see if the ram is shared elsewhere and if so what else is reserving it?
 
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If you've verified all of your ram modules work, you could have a bad slot if you have ruled out that the mobo itself doesn't have an 8gb limit.
 
since it's just a laptop it has just two slots, When i have 4+8 in one config I got 7.7 available, switch slots and got 11gb available. By having 2+8 it says 9.5 available, and ill get back with 2+4 is just a minute after i try messing with some drivers. I have also tried updating the bios to the newest one
 
Can you list the specific make and model or serial number for the laptop?
 
It's a lenovo z575, also 2+4 works as well (5.47 available but given the apu that seems normal). Officially it say the maximum ram supported is 8gb, but seeing as 10gb seems to work fine that would contradict their claim. One thing I did do very recently, i installed a new micropcie wifi card since the old one went bad. It is a different brand of card than the original, could that possibly cause the mobo to wonk out or something?
 
Bit of a mystery why it's working with more than 8GB. Perhaps a firmware/driver/bios update was released later that supported more than 8GB, but was particular to RAM modules (are you using identical modules?)
 
so the ram sticks I use are different makes (8gb corsair and the others are samsung) but the timings and frequencies are equivalent. At this point I've tried every possible combination of stick and slots and it is as follows:
8gb alone: 7.5 available in both slots
2+4gb: 5.5gb available in both orientations
8+2: 9.5 available in both orientations
8+4: 7.5 when the 8gb is in slot one, 11gb when it is in slot 2

I have scrubbed and reinstalled any drivers I could see having anything to do with mobo and gpu with the same results. Now I think I'm gonna have to pull out bigger guns and run a full mem test for each of the sticks individually, and if that shows nothing then pulling a reformat and maybe seeing if I can track down someone with a ddr3 compatible laptop I can test them in. I figured I'd run it all by here in case anyone has any other tests or whatever they think should be added.
 
I've got a lenovo thinkpad L420 I use at work, and when they purchased it for me (bout 1.5 years ago), it came with 4GB of RAM. I tried all kinds of different ram back then trying to get it to go over 8GB, and had no luck at all. Nothing I did would make it even see over 8GB. It looks like you've been able to break the 8GB limit, so that's a start I guess. I ended up going with 2x4GB sticks of 1600mhz Corsair Vengeance.

I don't think you have a problem with your RAM, I think it's just a limitation of the mobo. I'd check for a bios update. There may be one out there that will let it support larger sticks of RAM.
 
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cthulhuiscool said:
so the ram sticks I use are different makes (8gb corsair and the others are samsung) but the timings and frequencies are equivalent. At this point I've tried every possible combination of stick and slots and it is as follows:
8gb alone: 7.5 available in both slots
2+4gb: 5.5gb available in both orientations
8+2: 9.5 available in both orientations
8+4: 7.5 when the 8gb is in slot one, 11gb when it is in slot 2

I have scrubbed and reinstalled any drivers I could see having anything to do with mobo and gpu with the same results. Now I think I'm gonna have to pull out bigger guns and run a full mem test for each of the sticks individually, and if that shows nothing then pulling a reformat and maybe seeing if I can track down someone with a ddr3 compatible laptop I can test them in. I figured I'd run it all by here in case anyone has any other tests or whatever they think should be added.
Click to expand...

So why not just use 8+4 with 8gb in slot 2? You're using more RAM than the manufacturer claims the hardware supports so I'd just do it the way it works and consider yourself lucky.
 
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