DDR4 maxing at 2gb on Windows 7 32 bit

lansiar

Honorable
Jul 8, 2016
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I've got a very strange situation at work where we have high end machines that must run 32bit for certain drivers that power some of our older hardware. None of these machines will read more than 2.09 or 2.1gb of ddr4 ram when it should be capping out at 3gb+ at least. We've checked msconfig, bios settings, made sure onboard graphics were disabled and every channel with both 4gb and 8gb sticks. We also tested removing the graphics card and turning on onboard to see if that would force Windows to recognize more ram with no results. We have about 60 identical computers right now experiencing the same issues and it hasn't mattered if they've been imaged or had a base windows install.

Motherboard: Gigabyte H170-D3HP-CF
CPU: Intel Skylake i5 6500
Ram: Crucial DDR4 2x 8gb 2133 (these computers also have a second harddrive for when we roll to windows 10 64bit hence 16gb)
Graphics: Nvidia Geforce 970 GTX 4gb
 
Solution
Determined it was likely that the motherboard was causing the issue. Reached out to Gigabyte and they released a firmware update that fixed it today.

COLGeek

Cybernaut
Moderator
Does the BIOS recognize all of the physically installed memory properly?

In Windows, how are you determining that Windows only sees 2GB of memory? Or, is it that only 2GB is available?

Under Control Panel/System, how much memory is getting reported?
 

lansiar

Honorable
Jul 8, 2016
6
0
10,520


Both the BIOS and Windows properly recognize the amount of ram installed (whether we tried 1x or 2x of 4gb or 8gb Crucial DDR4 2133 sticks in all variations of DIMM slots). So in the system info it will show the proper amount installed with only 2.10gb usable.
 

COLGeek

Cybernaut
Moderator
Understood. As you know, a 32-bit OS can only use about 3.25GB of memory. Given Windows and any other apps you may have running, having 2.1 GB available would not be too unusual. Have you looked at your Task Manager to see if you have any unwanted/unruly applications hogging resources?
 

lansiar

Honorable
Jul 8, 2016
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VM8hTXV.jpg
rwpUgPH.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/VM8hTXV.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/rwpUgPH.jpg

A process using memory wouldn't count against the total physical memory available, as far as I know anyway.
 

lansiar

Honorable
Jul 8, 2016
6
0
10,520
Determined it was likely that the motherboard was causing the issue. Reached out to Gigabyte and they released a firmware update that fixed it today.
 
Solution