No, I said your video cards are taking up some of the 32-bit mode's total of 4GB of *addresses*. RAM without an address is invisible to the system. When you boot up the system, before the BIOS kicks in, 4GB of addresses are available. The BIOS takes some of those addresses and assigns them to various system hardware. Normally, this doesn't make a big difference, but because a graphics card is assigned enough addresses for its onboard RAM and then some, you're using up maybe 600 or 700MB of addresses per card. With two cards, that uses up something like 1.4GB of addresses. When you add in the other addresses used by the "normal" system hardware, you've used up another few hundred MB of addresses and you're down to only 2.25GB of unused addresses. It's only at this point that the BIOS assigns addresses to the main RAM. Sure you've got 8GB of RAM, but since only 2.25GB of addresses are left, only 2.25GB of RAM gets addresses and is visible/usable by Windows.