Older hardware eats RAM!

[ZWarrior]

Boom and IO were having a discussion not too long ago and he insisted that your video cards took some of your system RAM, and I was arguing it didn't .  I had never seen this and thus felt I was right.

Then I upgraded my system, with an ASUS A8N32-SL Deluxe mobo, from 2GB RAM to 4GB RAM.

The system said, at POST, I had only 2816MB RAM available (4096MB installed)

a quick search of the ASUS site turns up the following:

If you installed total 4GB memory, the system will detect less than 4GB of total memory because of address space allocation for other critical functions, such as:

- System BIOS (including motherboard, add-on cards, etc..)
- Motherboards resources
- Memory mapped I/O
- configuration for AGP/PCI-Ex/PCI
- Other memory allocations for PCI devices
 
Different onboard devices and different add-on cards (devices) will result of different total memory size.
e.g. more PCI cards installed will require more memory resources, resulting of less memory free for other uses.

On a SLI system, since PCI-Ex graphic cards will occupy around 256MB, another 256MB will be occupied after you install a 2nd PCI-Ex graphic card. Hence, 2.75GB memory left only if two SLI cards installed on A8N-SLI Premium while 3.0GB memory left with one graphic card without other add-on devices.
 
This limitation applies to most chipsets & Microsoft Windows 32-bit version operating systems.
 
If you install Windows 32-bit version operating system, we recommend that you install less than 3GB of total memory. If more than 3GB memory is required for your system, then below two conditions must be met:
1. The memory controller which supports memory swap functionality is used. Chipsets later than Intel 975X, 955X, Nvidia NF4 SLI Intel Edition, Nvidia NF4 SLI X16, and AMD K8 CPU architecture support memory swap function.
2. Windows 64-bit OS which can address more than 4GB memory.
 
You can check below URLs for reference:
http://dlsvr.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/4GB_Rev1.pdf
http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/sb/cs-016594.htm

 

I publicly apologize Boom, you were right.  I have never in my life seen this on any system I have worked with until now.

I feel cheated and ripped off now.  Supposedly the newer mobos don't have this issue.