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Fully activating dual channel memory

Rybo
By Rybo
in CPUs, Motherboards, and Memory
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Had a weird situation with an old FX-8320 era computer that I've been using.  I recently went from one stick of ram to the vaunted Dual Channel club, but I ran into a strange problem: all of the various places for reporting physical memory gave me the correct number: 16gb of RAM (CPU-Z, Task Manager, System Information, namely).  However, the things that report *available* physical memory (Task Manager, Sys Info) were only reporting 8gb -- they were considering my second stick to be...I don't know.  I honestly didn't think much of it since I've never had dual channel memory before -- I just thought that's how dual channel memory manifested in the system.  

6 months later, however, I built a new computer recently which reported correctly: 16gb of ram, 16 available on all counts (and CPU-Z reporting it as being in dual channel mode).  That led me to try to figure out what was up with my old PC.  I didn't get far: I combed through the BIOS looking for pertinent settings (and incidentally turned on MSI's turbo boost feature), but I found nothing.  When I booted back up, all of my memory was there.  That incidental BIOS change caused the system to correctly recognize my RAM configuration.

TLDR: upgraded to dual channel, had to force bios to save a change before system correctly recognized RAM.

 

Is that normal, or was it just an artifact of bygone days of yore?  Or is my system just uniquely weird?  

#Muricaparrotgang

 

Folding@Home Stats | Current PC Loadout: 

Small                        Bigger				Biggerer				Biggest
Fractal Design Focus G       NZXT H1				Lian LI O11 Dynamic XL			Fractal Design Meshify C
FX-8320                      Ryzen 3 3200G			Ryzen 5 3600				Ryzen 7 3700X
120mm AIO                    120mm AIO				Custom 280mm loop			Noctua NH-D15
A motherboard                ASRock B450 mobo			MSI x570 mobo				MSI x570 mobo
16gb DDR3                    16gb DDR4 @ 3200			16gb DDR4 @ 3200			16gb DDR4 @ 3600
a melange of HDDs/SSDs       WD 1tb m.2				WD 500gb m.2				WD 1tb m.2/2tb HDD
PNY GTX 1070 x2              GTX 1070				GTX 1070 FE				MSI RTX 2080 TI
some 650w PSU                650W SFX-L 80+ Gold		MSI RTX 2080 Super			EVGA SuperNova 750w 80+ GOLD 
								Corsair RM850x 80+ GOLD

 

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You shouldn't have to activate any memory. The system should just detect it and enable dual channel automatically. Every build I've done has had the behavior of automatically detecting the physical hardware, without having to configure anything basic(save for maybe XMP). Even when I had an FX 8120, I didn't need to do any configuring like that. 

"It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brain falls out." - Carl Sagan.

"I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you" - Edward I. Koch

"I didn't die! I performed a tactical reset!" - Apollolol

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