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8888
September 19th, 2008 13:00
Memory not reading correctly
I have a dimension e510 and I recently upgraded the video card to a xfx 8600 gt and bought 2 more gigs of ram (1 gig sticks) now I had 2 gigs orginally and it system info read 2 gigs when they new sticks arrived I put them in and only read 3 gig, so i put the new video card in now it reads 2.5 gig even with all 4 sticks in? im aware that some systems 32 bit do not recognize 4 gigs but in BIOS says I have 4 gigs installed and a 64 bit sys, its all very confusing for me.
My question now is do i take a stick out and send it back, or is the ram working my pc is just not reading it correctly except only in the bios? im under the impression maybe the video card is using some of the memory thats fine, is it pointless to have the 4 sticks if system tab not reading it or do I just leave em in they work I just dont see it?? any help would be greatly appreciated ty in advance.
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PETER345
5.8K Posts
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September 19th, 2008 13:00
The BIOS only knows about your hardware, not the software, so it is telling you that it is a 64-bit machine. Run a 32-bit OS on it and it might as well be 32-bit.
Press the Windows key-Break key and it will show you what OS you are running.
Peter
PETER345
5.8K Posts
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September 19th, 2008 13:00
Do you have a 64-bit OS? Most computers these days are 64-bit, but the OS is most likely still 32-bit. E510s came standard with 32-bit XP.
With a 32-bit OS, I only have 3G available on my 9200 with 4G RAM. If you put in graphics cards with large amounts of memory that takes space in the 4G, reducing your system RAM more.
I suspect it is fine. XP is very wasteful in it's use of the 4G address space. If I run 32-bit Linux I get much closer to 4G available.
Peter
Jennpb
3 Posts
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September 19th, 2008 13:00
Well when I looked in BIOS it said 64 but im not that pc savy lol I could be looking at it totally wrong is there a specific place I should look for it? I mean 2.5 gig is fine I just didnt want to keep em and pay for em if its not even going to work video card says 512 ram so thats where im guessing half the gig went which is acceptable of course
Jennpb
3 Posts
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September 19th, 2008 13:00
PETER345
5.8K Posts
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September 19th, 2008 14:00
If you have mismatched pairs of RAM, then you will lose dual channel mode. You might not notice the difference, but it is lower performance.
Peter
RoHe
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September 19th, 2008 19:00
As Peter said, you don't want to use mis-matched pairs or only 1 of pair of modules. You could return both and get 2 500 MB modules...
If you have Windows XP Pro, you could use the /3GB "memory switch" which would make more RAM available to your applications, as described here.
Ron