[SOLVED] A small problem with one of my two RAM sticks

Page 2 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Jul 31, 2021
7
0
10
Two years ago I got my first gaming pc, I went to a local hardware store ordered all of the components and asked them to build it for me since I was still pretty insecure about [mess] something up while building it.

After 1 year and a half I noticed that after around a full day on my pc my Memory percentage in the task manager would go way above 60%, when it was never even above 30% (with gaming around 50%). Now 2 years have passed and the problem still persist yet even more noticeably. Whenever I turn my pc on or restart it, the starting Memory percentage is already at around 40% and after a day it goes up to 80-99%. Which makes everything more laggy. It's gotten to the point where it's annoying since the frame drops and lag spikes happen when I'm in game.

I clean my PC regularly every month, I did a Windows memory diagnostic 4 months ago and no error was found. I also get an error notification whenever I try to restart my PC after let's say two days of leaving it turned on.

My PC specs:
4241d13d6412fd7cea8e888fcc3bebb5.png


Closer up RAM information:
819bd5807dc9af4170079324a13de1f0.png


The part that confuses me the most is the fact that it says 'Total Physical 16GB' and then in 'Available Physical 8.61GB'. Could there be a problem on one of my RAM sticks? Could it be any software interfering with it? Could the frequency be too high/low?

I would really appreciate any help I could get here. Any further questions anyone might have I will try to answer as fast as possible as I really do want an explanation to this problem. If I don't find an actual solution I will probably go replace the RAM stick or use the 5 year warranty I got with them building it.
Thank you for taking the time out of your day to read this. :)

-Kat
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Solution
no its recognizing the kit is a dual channel kit but if you look at the total available vs. the physical ram you can see that its only using half
Dual channel mode happens when you have one stick in channel a and one in channel b.
There is no bios setting for this.

Windows memory statistics can be confusing.
Some ram is dedicated to the windows nucleus and so are other parts of windows.
Some apps can fix ram so that it is not available for other use.
I suspect that discord or other app is fixing an 8gb area, making it unavailable for windows use.
no its recognizing the kit is a dual channel kit but if you look at the total available vs. the physical ram you can see that its only using half
Dual channel mode happens when you have one stick in channel a and one in channel b.
There is no bios setting for this.

Windows memory statistics can be confusing.
Some ram is dedicated to the windows nucleus and so are other parts of windows.
Some apps can fix ram so that it is not available for other use.
I suspect that discord or other app is fixing an 8gb area, making it unavailable for windows use.
 
Solution

Wolfshadw

Titan
Moderator
Behave people. Keep your posts on topic.
For the record, you cannot have 8.61GB Physical Available Memory if only one 8GB RAM Module is being recognized. Clearly 16GB of RAM is installed and recognized. If 8.61GB is available, the other 7.39 is currently in use.

Wolfshadw
Moderator.