ASUS UX501V RAM Issues

finnglink · January 21, 2020

Hey! So this will be my first post here then.

I currently run an ASUS UX501V Laptop (Windows 10 64 Bit). I‘ve bought it about 3-4 years ago. It used to have 16GB of RAM, along with a 512GB NVMe SSD.
Somewhere around 1-1,5 years later, from one day to the other, it only displayed 8GB of RAM and ran visibly slower. I contacted the support team (I bought an extended 4 year warranty, which I‘ll never do again), but not much help there. They asked me to send it in (somewhere in Poland I believe) for repair, which they claimed to take up to two months. As I needed the Laptop for work (freelance content creator) and couldn‘t get a replacement device for the time being, I decided to live with it - until now.

Since I don’t really care about that extended warranty anymore, I decided to take a look myself. I‘m not a total noob with computers and diy stuff. I opened the case, and there was only one stick of RAM in there, labelled 8GB. I took it out, still runs fine, still 8GB. So, somewhere on the board is a soldered 8GB module, I suppose. Needless to say, I thought the removable module was toast, and bought a replacement. I went for a 16GB 2400 DDR4 stick from Crucial. Put it in, turned it on, nothing changed (I thought).

Windows still shows 8GB in the task manager and Ressource monitor

I fired up CPU-Z, and that‘s where things get confusing.

Apparently, there IS a 16GB Crucial module in there. But where did my 8GB onboard memory suddenly go?

I took the 16GB stick out and ran the test again and voila, back to the 8GB it is.

Btw, the BIOS / UEFI (whatever this actually is) shows only 8GB as well

Does anyone have an idea what’s going on here? Something is pretty wrong, I suspect some sort of software-hiccup. And by now im sure, that the original 8GB Stick is just fine...
I still have no idea what broke it. As far as I can remember, there were no updates around the time it happened, and except the performance-drop, nothing caught my eye.

If you need anything else, I‘m happy to supply it.
I hope you can help me.

Greetings,
Finn