Strange RAM behavior

Eastman51 · December 27, 2018

After watching the last episode of Secret Shoppers, I began to notice something.

In the video, Linus pointed out the idle RAM usage of each machine; in most but the Alienware, RAM usage at idle was under 2GB.

I have two desktop PCs, one is a 4th gen Intel i5 PC and the other is a Ryzen 5 2600x PC. Both have 16GB of RAM and SATA boot SSDs. The i5 machine uses 2 GB of RAM after a fresh reboot (task manager and HWmonitor are the only apps open). The Ryzen machine uses 4.2GB of RAM after a fresh reboot (again, just Task Manager and HWmonitor). Both have Steam set to open at launch, but I disabled that for this test. The Ryzen machine does have a not-Windows-Defender antivirus installed, but Windows reports it at less than 50MB of RAM usage (lower than the i5's Windows Defender RAM usage by a large margin). Both PCs have Nvidia GPUs, have Geforce experience, and the latest drivers. Both GPUs also happen to be Asus cards, so I have GPU Tweak II installed and set to run at boot (task man reports less than 10MB of RAM usage on both PCs for this). Both PCs basically have the same software set, with very few and minor differences. The only major difference I can think of is that the Ryzen machine had Windows installed near 4 or 5 months ago, while the i5 machine had Windows installed last week (when I got the new SSD for it, tried to clone the 3 week old image but the SSD failed to boot after a clone so I clean installed). However, I did recently get a watchdog_timeout bsod on the Ryzen PC (RAM OC to 3000MHz, RAM kit is Corsair Vengeance 3000MHz); so maybe this is related? Ryzen PC also has an 18.6 second BIOS time, vs the I5 PC's 12.2 second BIOS time (according to le task manager).

Ryzen machine is running Win10 1803, i5 machine is running Win10 1809 (made a fresh install USB, MS updated their ISO for Win10 to 1809).

The i5 PC's idle RAM usage doesn't really concern me, as it is quite close to being less than 2GB. But the fact that the Ryzen PC has more than double the RAM usage (after a clean reboot and left to idle for a few minutes) is very odd.

Edit: I wonder if its Corsair's iCUE software. That stupid pile of garbo has caused me too many problems in the past. And it always crops up with an error message on restart/shutdown. Only reason I have it installed is for my mouse, but I almost never use it.