Computer has 16GB matching RAM (4x4GB) only 6.46 GB usable.

[chrisbradshaw]

I'm looking at a computer for a friend he had built a few years back, and it's really starting to confuse me.

Specs:
AMD FX-6350
16.0GB RAM
MSI 970 Gaming
2x GTX 750 Ti
Windows 7 64bit

Now I've installed all the latest BIOS and chipset drivers. Windows "sees" all 16GB of RAM, but only 6.46 is usable. I've not got a great deal of experience with AMD systems in all honesty so I'm at a loss here really. Is this a common issue for the old FX series? Any ideas on what could be going on here?

Also, the more eagle eyed of you may have noticed something else peculiar going on here - 2 750 Tis? Two cards that don't support SLI, no SLI bridge between them, just two identical cards sitting there with one doing nothing. Weird, right? My first instinct was that the original owner wanted to use one as a physx card, and the other as the main GPU, but I'm told the original owner only used it for flight sims, so physx would be useless right?

Anyway, this computer is a bit of a puzzle, any ideas about the RAM issue? And can anyone think why the graphics cards are set up like this?

Cheers guys.

Quick edit: There's no integrated graphics on this board either, so it's not being grabbed by that (although I have no idea what ikind of IGPU would need 10GB for anyway...)

 

[androbourne]

How many ram sticks in the board and what sizes?

Could be possible mis match in memory or bad dimm slots. Have you checked the memory specs and different dimm slots?

How are you seeing that only 6gb is usable when the system reports full 16gb?

 

[chrisbradshaw]

How many ram sticks in the board and what sizes?

Could be possible mis match in memory or bad dimm slots. Have you checked the memory specs and different dimm slots?

How are you seeing that only 6gb is usable when the system reports full 16gb?

4x4GB DIMMS in the MSI 970 gaming MOBO, all 1866 MHz DDR3. The BIOS recognises all 4 and windows system information reports 16.0 GB (6.46 usable).

Just been looking into it more and apparently the missing 9764 MB of RAM is hardware reserved.

 

[androbourne]

How many ram sticks in the board and what sizes?

Could be possible mis match in memory or bad dimm slots. Have you checked the memory specs and different dimm slots?

How are you seeing that only 6gb is usable when the system reports full 16gb?

4x4GB DIMMS in the MSI 970 gaming MOBO, all 1866 MHz DDR3. The BIOS recognises all 4 and windows system information reports 16.0 GB (6.46 usable).

Just been looking into it more and apparently the missing 9764 MB of RAM is hardware reserved.

That is way higher then normal for system reserve. Normally its around 2GB, not 10GB.

Do you have a custom page file in place?

 

[chrisbradshaw]

How many ram sticks in the board and what sizes?

Could be possible mis match in memory or bad dimm slots. Have you checked the memory specs and different dimm slots?

How are you seeing that only 6gb is usable when the system reports full 16gb?

4x4GB DIMMS in the MSI 970 gaming MOBO, all 1866 MHz DDR3. The BIOS recognises all 4 and windows system information reports 16.0 GB (6.46 usable).

Just been looking into it more and apparently the missing 9764 MB of RAM is hardware reserved.

That is way higher then normal for system reserve. Normally its around 2GB, not 10GB.

Do you have a custom page file in place?

Thanks for the quick responses.

Page file is set to automatic, currently at 6620 MB.

 

[androbourne]

Just for testing sake. Set a custom page file. Like 2gb-4gb on min and max then reboot your PC. Did it free up anything extra?

 

[chrisbradshaw]

Just for testing sake. Set a custom page file. Like 2gb-4gb on min and max then reboot your PC. Did it free up anything extra?

No change I'm afraid.

 

[androbourne]

Open task manager then click on memory on the left side. Down at the bottom right should say "hardware reserved" how much is reserved? and how much is comited?

I have 4GB on my laptop and only 136mb is hardware reserved. So something about your setup seems way off.