4gb + vista64 issue

gareth170

gareth170

gareth170

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hi..

i have 4gb + vista64 since vista was released and it's been working fine.. but since about 2weeks ago its been showing 3326mb. on the post it shows 4gb, also ive put the self test on in the bios and it clocks up to 3326 then it stops for a second then jumps to "4096 OK"... ive reinstalled vista but it's still the same.. i haven't changed or updated the bios..... since i've installed sp1 it's saying i have 4gb but physical memory 3326mb...

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If you care to read the notes on SP1 it will quite literally tell you that although it will now display all availabe memory you will still be restricted by the resources of a 32bit operating system. Unless your version of Vista went from being 32bit to 64bit overnight.
The PAE or Physical Address Environment available does not change from one service pack extention. For a 32 Bit environment you can only have 4GB available Address space to the resources and working space in the Operating System. Your Graphics card may actually take up 512MB or more of this memory Address space, the rest is taken up by motherboard resources, caches and IRQ I/O addressing. You cn do the same with XP by using PAE extension but this will not show PAE structure. In 32 bit as well as 16 bit addressing you will always have restrictions. The problem is that you cannot shadow all resources, and if you managed to do so you would end up with a slower Operating system and more BSODs because resources need processor time and it is better the resources are shown up front than hidden. You will end up with a kind of DISK Thrashing with both memory and CPU time and the processes will gradually come to a halt.
Our motherboards often show us how backwards our setups are. They still look for the Legacy memory structure left overs from MS-DOS and the faitful memory hole at 15-16MB Perhaps that is why Vista 32bit is shown as Vista x86.
 
i've ran memtest and the ram seems to be ok. @ jeffa123 i'm using 64bit i didn't upgrade from 32bit to 64bit.... i have 3 OS'S vista64, vista32, xp all on separate partitions..

anyway i think i've found the problem, the promise reid controler seems to be taking the memory. when i skip the promise reid controler at the post, windows uses all 4gb... this as only started happening about 2weeks ago since ive used all 6 sata ports. 2 of motherboard ports + 2 e-sata's are run by the promise reid controler and the other 4 ports are run by ati 600sb . but i really didn't think using all 6 ports would do this....

as anyone seen this happen before??
 
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