Only 50% of my 16 gigs of ram available in windows

Lennart van de Merwe · April 12, 2020

Hi guys, my PC has been working just fine for quite a while, but today for some reason in windows my ram settings have changed: only 7,9 gbs are available as normal ram. The other 8,1 gbs have turned into hardware reserved ram for no reason. I also saw that my memory speed is at 2133 Mhz instead of the normal 3000 Mhz. My settings in the bios haven't changed (it's still got XMP enabled and is supposed to run at 3000 Mhz according to my bios). Nothing has happened with my computer as far as I'm aware, it must've happened today since I experienced some instability in minecraft today, but not yesterday (Minecraft's got 8 gbs dedicated in the settings and that's a problem if it's only got 4 gbs). So, my question for you guys: what's happened with my ram, and how to fix it?

Thanks in advance.

Specs:
Ryzen 2600x
2x8 gbs of corsair vengeance ram (3000 Mhz)
Aorus B450 elite gaming motherboard
(rtx 2060; 60 gb ssd; etc.)

Task manager window at this time:

Lennart van de Merwe · April 12, 2020

20 minutes ago, Lennart van de Merwe said:

Hi guys, my PC has been working just fine for quite a while, but today for some reason in windows my ram settings have changed: only 7,9 gbs are available as normal ram. The other 8,1 gbs have turned into hardware reserved ram for no reason. I also saw that my memory speed is at 2133 Mhz instead of the normal 3000 Mhz. My settings in the bios haven't changed (it's still got XMP enabled and is supposed to run at 3000 Mhz according to my bios). Nothing has happened with my computer as far as I'm aware, it must've happened today since I experienced some instability in minecraft today, but not yesterday (Minecraft's got 8 gbs dedicated in the settings and that's a problem if it's only got 4 gbs). So, my question for you guys: what's happened with my ram, and how to fix it?

Thanks in advance.

Good news! I have fixed it. After watching a sketchy Slovenian tech-youtuber list me three options to fix this I decided that the memory swap wouldn't hurt. With this I mean a quite literal memory swap: you take stick 1 out of slot 1 and stick 2 out of slot 2 and then put stick 1 in slot 2 and stick 2 in slot 1. Then I booted, went into the bios and reconfigured my XMP-profile. badabiembadaboem. IT WORKS!

Proof of my caveman solution (with the ltt window so I couldn't have faked it):