Optiplex 780: Win7 64-bit does not recognize passed 4GB

Hi CrankManiac,

Please post a screen shot of your system properties (excl your license). Like this:

Sorry, image did not go through the first time.

Hi Osprey,

Thanks for the quick response.

On a side note, when I have my processors at maximum capacity, the RAM should increase in the Task Manager or Resource Monitor, I would think.

System monitor is not an exact measure of ram.  "it never pushes passed 3.5 GB" is not really a Dell issue.

You do not have 8 contigious gigs of ram. There are holes in the memory map for Bios, PCI video etc.

You cannot turn off ATI Hyperjunk or Nvidia Turbo Trash.

HyperMemory is ATI Technologies' method of using the motherboard's main system RAM as part of or all of the video card's framebuffer memory.

TurboCache is NVIDIA Technologies' method of using the motherboard's main system RAM as part of or all of the video card's framebuffer memory.

Windows 64 bit will Not use larger than 4 GIG pages of memory.

4GB is the highest physical address accessible with the standard x86 driver and software mode.

Not all software runs at 64 bit mode and some never runs in that mode.

You could run a Virtual machine or 2 or 3 and allocate 1 gig or more of ram to them.

I think you're good!!

I guess so huh?  I am a little disappointed, perhaps I need to do more research on the software side.

I am a Development Group Manager for a software company, on Friday I opened up 2xVisual Studio 2012, opened our largest web site which contains almost 4,000 files, I opened several web services, a SQL Server Management tool for querying databases.  I went ahead and configured Resource Monitor to watch my processors, caches, committed memory, standby memory, and hard disk I/O.  Then I went ahead and started a build on that big web site along with heavy memory intensive processes and found that I max'd out everything except for my RAM.  My processors were all 100% my disk I/O was through the roof for the swap file, etc..  However, I never crested the summit of about 3.75GB of RAM being used.

The other new 4GB that I recently installed is sitting dormant.  I'll continue my research to identify why my computer is not utilizing all of the 8GB RAM.

Thanks for all of your posts and assistance, I appreciate it.

I use my box (XPS 7100 with Asus mainboard, Core i5 quad-core, 8gb RAM, 128gb SSD, 2tb HD, Sapphire 5670 video) for development.

With three VS 2010, one SQL Server Management Studio, one Visual Source Safe, ten IE 9, and one Windows Live Mail windows open, 2647 MB is in use with 5072 MB on standby.

A tip: if you really want to speed up your dev box, install an SSD and use that for the primary boot drive. The difference is night and day.

I have another box, a mini-ITX on which I installed a Core i7 with 16 GB RAM, but short of using it as a server, I can't imagine how I can use that much RAM. I only installed it because 1, it was on sale; and 2, to determine if the motherboard would indeed support it. (It did.)