Apu and ram concerns

[Kev Thomas]

Decided on a budget build consisting of a amd a10-7800 apu and 8 gig dual channel amd ram and a asus a55-bm-e motherboard with windows 7 x64,windows shows 8 gig ram with 3.44 usable? As I've come to understand the gpu is taking ram for itself so I went in to bios and set it to 512 for the gpu and managed to get the ram to 3.7 usable, is it taking over 4 gig itself? I even tried my mates 16 gig dual ram and it showed 16 gig with 6 usable, I'm really confused as to what is going on as surely it's taking too much or is this normal?

 

[rockie_]

Maybe Superfetch caches a lot of files in the RAM .

if your Windows is 32 bit , regardless of the amount of RAM , max 4GB is used .
info
But in the case with your friends memory , 6GB usable , so you really have 64bit Windows .

 

[Kev Thomas]

I'm not even sure what that means lol I seem to be getting mixed answers from ppl I know,some say my issue is normal and some say it's not....obviously it's not performing as it would with 7-8 gig usable as I know os takes some

 

[Kev Thomas]

No it's 64 bit windows

 

[rockie_]

i edited my first post .
Run Task Manager and see .

 

[Kev Thomas]

It now appears my hdd has failed (s.m.a.r.t) so I'm unable to get on that pc, should have another one in there in about a hour with a screen shot of task manager

 

[hang-the-9]

This may help you sort things out http://support2.microsoft.com/kb/978610

 

[rockie_]

It now appears my hdd has failed (s.m.a.r.t) so I'm unable to get on that pc, should have another one in there in about a hour with a screen shot of task manager

Tatal .
Cached
Available
Free .

If Total is 8GB , it is fine

 

[Kev Thomas]

ok sorry for the delay, bit of an update....sent asus a55-bm-e motherboard back and replaced it with a A88XM-PLUS, found another hdd and installed w7 professional 64 bit, updated all motherboard drivers from website including updating bios to newest version and installed all windows updates so all good there...bios shows 2 x 4 memory installed but says 4 gig ram total, windows shows 4 gig ram with 3.75 available and task manager shows
Total 3524
cached 1245
available 2121
free 952
Also checked msconfig and total memory is NOT ticked?

 

[hang-the-9]

Try running with one stick at a time.

There are a bunch of suggestions here http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/267749-30-windows-usable Quite a few report an issue with the CPU and a pin.

 

[Kev Thomas]

Checked the pins and everything looks in place so can rule that out, also again I tried both ram modules individually and now it's not posting with either in slot 3 and 4

 

[hang-the-9]

Checked the pins and everything looks in place so can rule that out, also again I tried both ram modules individually and now it's not posting with either in slot 3 and 4

Sounds like you have two bad slots on the motherboard.