A Story As Old As Time: 8GB RAM Installed, 3.95 GB Available

[7point45gigboi]

Earlier today I opened task manager to discover that my brand new, self-built gaming PC had only half of its RAM available. I've looked all over the internet, including several threads on here. Despite all this, none of the solutions have worked for me. I've got 2 sticks of 4 GB G.SKILL RIPJAWS RAM on an MSI 970 Gaming Motherboard. I don't think my hardware is faulty as both windows and BIOS recognize 8 GB RAM installed. It wouldn't be impossible that it is the hardware though, seeing as the delivery people were kind enough not to knock and leave to my RAM out in below zero temperatures for hours. I think it's possible that it's because my BIOS is out of date, but MSI has probably the worst update software I have seen, it doesn't show BIOS updates as being available, even though I know for a fact that it's out of date. I tried manually updating BIOS, didn't work. Tried msconfig, all that, didn't work. I'm pretty damn certain that the RAM's compatible with everything else. Any help and/or suggestions will be greatly appreciate!

Edit: Completely forgot to mention; Windows 7 64-bit.

 

[GhislainG]

If your BIOS is older than 2015-12-23, why not download version M.4 from https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/support/970-GAMING and use a USB key to upgrade? Do both modules work fine when only one is installed?

 

[7point45gigboi]

If your BIOS is older than 2015-12-23, why not download version M.4 from https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/support/970-GAMING and use a USB key to upgrade? Do both modules work fine when only one is installed?

Okay so, first of all I have already tried updating my BIOS via USB, it didn't seem to do anything. However, it turns out one of my sticks is in fact dead. Obviously this is something I should have tested initially, but because both windows and my BIOS recognized that there was 8 GB I thought it had to be working. I guess not. Thanks a bunch for taking the time to help me out, I guess I'll contact G.SKILL.

 

[GhislainG]

Windows excludes memory that fails the minimal test performed at boot time; that sometimes causes confusion.