issues with memory upgrade

[AthlonXP]

ok so I went ahead and got 4 sticks of pc3200 1gb size of corsair valueram and I install it into my gateway gm5088 system in which the board specifications says it can use up to 4gb of ram. So now it only reads 3.25gb and for some reason is running at cas 2.5 which makes the ram only run as pc2700. What should I do to fix this, this is totally weird. When I run cpu z it showed me all 4 sticks are recognizable with thier right sizes but for some dumb reason my bios and system are only reading 3.25gb??? was wondering if anyone has any insights on this or should I just gut this system and match it up with this Asus A8n5x board I have laying around... I really want a super quiet machine and this btx setup that gateway has is doing the job just fine.

 

[Frank4d]

3.25GB is normal. A Windows 32-bit machine can access 4GB of PCI address space. Each card and I/O device in the PC, and the swap file are mapped into the 4GB address space and the 3.25GB is what is left over for Windows and applications.

As for the memory speed, check your mobo manual and see what it says about using 4 sticks vs. 2 sticks. Some mobos have limitations and also are picky about whether the sticks are single or double sided.

 

[AthlonXP]

yeah i removed 2 of the sticks and put back in 2 sticks of the single sided pc3200 and the machine runs at the normal 3200 speeds and reads 3gb fully. .. btw i am running server 2003 on my rig.