Does windows 10 mean more ram for 880g chipset

[domisdom]

 so i have a a acer/foxconn MB.GAY09.001 RS880M05G1  motherboard which is stock in a gateway dx4320-02e desktop with a phenom ii 1055t 120w x6 cpu , a 480w  replace power PSU stock is 330w  , evga Gtx1050TI ssc 4gb Gpu, soundblaster z pcie soundcard 1gb . 2tb barracuda hdd  , originally i installed 2(2x2gb)=8gb AMD entertainment edition ddr3 ram chips because crucial told me i can only support 8gb of ram but when you look around for actual specs it says it can support 16gb ddr3 . however some sites lead me to believe that is  a limitation of windows 7  . i used the anytime upgrade and have windows 10 64bit with some windows 7 remnants  now windows 10 home 64bit supposedly can support 128gb of ram . i have dual channel with 4 dimm slots  and id like to shove as much ram evenly into those slots a pc build calculator estimates im only using about 300 watts of my total 480 watts that are available . does anyone know the answer because windows 10 info on this older stuff isnt exactly easy to find.

  

[5x5]

Even windows 7 should work fine with 16GBs. The only reason for RAM limitation could be either BIOS support or a 32-bit OS

[domisdom]

 but is that my limit ?   

[mariushm]

You are confusing things.

The limitations can occur at various points.

 

In one simple sentence, the operating system can support some amount of memory, as long as the underlying hardware can also support that amount of memory.

So Windows 10 may support up to 128 GB of memory, but the hardware (the processor and the motherboard) must also be able to properly support the number of memory sticks and the variety of memory sticks to reach up to 128 GB of memory.

 

There is barely a reason for Windows 10 to only support 128 GB of memory, or 256 GB of memory - these numbers are most likely an artificial limitation imposed by Microsoft, in order to make you choose more expensive versions of Windows 10, or server versions of Windows operating system, if you want to work with more memory than that amount.

There are some technological reasons as well (such as optimizations being made to make the operating system work smoother with low amounts of memory that would be counter intuitive when used on systems with a lot of memory) but usually the limitation of maximum memory on operating systems is artificial.

 

On Windows 7, the maximum memory is artificially limited to 16 GB on Home versions, if my memory is correct. If you want the operating system to use more than 16 GB, you're supposed to use the Pro versions or some other versions of Windows 7 or maybe Windows 2008.

Note that your computer can actually have more than 16 GB of memory installed, IF the hardware (cpu and motherboard) actually support it, but Windows will only use the first 16 GB of memory due to the artificial restriction of the license..

 

Now, how much a computer can actually support also depends on the motherboard, the number of slots and in some cases, the chipset (a chip on the motherboard) if the computer is older.

In old computers, the memory controller (a component which reads and writes data from memory sticks) was located inside the chipset, and was like a person between the processor and the memory sticks, handling data transfers between processor and memory sticks.

In new processors, to get faster speeds, this memory controller is inside the processor, so that makes building motherboards easier.

 

In your case, it's most likely the motherboard supports a maximum of 8 GB of memory or 16 GB, due to a combination of the maximum number of memory slots and the maximum capacity each memory stick can have.

 

Each memory stick is made of tiny memory chips, which have to be installed on the memory stick in multiples of 8 due to how processors and motherboards are made (each tiny chip sends 8 bits at a time, so you need 8 tiny chips x 8 bits = 64 bit memory bus) .

So a memory stick may have 8 tiny chips or may have 16 chips. With newer processors and memory stick types like DDR4, it's possible to have 24 or 32 tiny memory chips (3 x 8 or 4 x 8 tiny chips)

 

-edit  : initially read that you have 2 memory slots, but it seems your motherboard has 4 slots so corrected -

 

Your motherboard probably has four memory slots, which limits your maximum memory to 4 times the maximum capacity of a memory stick available.

If your system uses DDR3 memory, the maximum capacity memory sticks common when DDR3 was popular was 4 GB and 8 GB memory sticks.

So you could have :

4 GB stick made with 8 tiny chips ( 8 x 512 MB = 4 GB)

4 GB stick made with 16 tiny chips (16 x 256 MB = 4 GB)

8 GB stick made with 8 tiny chips ( 8 x 1 GB = 8 GB)

8 GB stick made with 16 tiny chips (16 x 512 MB = 8 GB)

 

The memory controller on your motherboard, may not be smart enough to be able to deal with memory sticks that use 16 tiny memory chips or for some reason it only supports memory sticks that are maximum 4 GB each.

So, you are limited by the number of slots (4 slots)  multiplied by the maximum capacity of memory stick the memory controller can deal with (4 GB sticks)

 

It could be that when the motherboard was designed and manufactured, DDR3 memory was so new that you couldn't manufacture 8 GB sticks using only 8 tiny chips, because nobody made tiny 1 GB chips, to make a 8 GB stick using 8 tiny 1 GB chips. So, the motherboard bios only recognizes 4 GB for each stick.

 

It could be that now when 8 GB sticks are very common, you could install 8 GB sticks and the motherboard would simply recognize the sticks, or you may have to perform a bios update and after a bios update, the motherboard would recognize 2 sticks x 8 GB per stick, for a total of 16 GB.

 

The AMD ram is just regular DDR3 ram, but which often uses more than 8 tiny ram chips, arranged and wired in a specific way on the memory stick.  Memory controllers inside AMD processors and chipsets were a bit more flexible and supported more ways of arranging those tiny memory chips on the memory sticks, allowing some manufacturers to use lower cheap , cheaper, easier to manufacture tiny memory chips on the memory stick. Intel was more picky about how you put those tiny ram chips on the stick, how they're wired.

Some intel memory controllers don't support the way those tiny memory chips are arranged on such memory sticks, so Intel motherboards sometimes don't support these memory sticks... that's why you have AMD only memory sticks on the market, and regular DDR3 memory sticks.

 

Just the same, on modern computers, Windows 10 may recognize 128 GB of memory, and it's actually very simple to achieve that with a Threadripper processor and motherboard, because you have 8 memory slots, so you can easily install 8 x 16 GB sticks on the motherboard.

However, desktop Intel and regular socket AM4 motherboards (for Ryzen processors) only have 4 memory slots, so depending on the size of each memory stick you could have 4 x 4 = 16 GB, 4x8 = 32 GB, 4x16 = 64 GB ... only very recently memory sticks that are 32 GB in size were manufactured, but again, those 32 GB sticks use 4 groups of 8 tiny chips, and not all processors and motherboards support this niche type of memory stick.

Some processors support  only sticks with 1 or 2 groups of 8 tiny memory chips on the stick.

So, even though Windows 10 can work with 128 GB of memory, the processor and motherboard may limit you to 32 or 64 GB.

 

If you use a 32 bit version of an operating system, Microsoft artificially limits the operating system to 4 GB maximum memory, for backwards compatibility and to reduce problems with badly written drivers.

32 bit operating systems can otherwise work with more than 4 GB of memory, but each application is restricted to 2-3 GB of memory (2 is standard, can be extended to 3 using some options but not all applications support those options well so by default, 2 GB is the limit)

For example, Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 if my memory is correct, could work even with 1 TB of memory (on special server computers with 4-8 processors and plenty of memory slots)

 

Hope it helps clarify some things ... if it's still not clear ask.

 

edit.  and for completeness ... in theory a processor can work with 2⁶⁴ bits of memory ... that's 2,147,483,648 GB of memory. 

However, to make processors cheaper to manufacture, internally they're cheating and only use 48 bits (I think some of the first 64bit processors only used 40 bits) so the processors these days can access a maximum of 32768 TB of ram ... or something like that.

I may be wrong though, either way, the numbers are really big... and our limitation is the maximum size of individual tiny chips of memory we can manufacture... these days 2 GB tiny chips are common, but future DDR5 may make 3 or 6 GB tiny chips ( i think the standard allows for up to 8 GB chips), so we may have up to 256 GB sticks (4 groups x 8 chips x 8 GB) ...

[domisdom]

the part where im hung up is that some websites that sell mb's with 880g chipsets  hint that they are only lmitied because of the OS and it looks like theyre too old for reliable windows10 specific info in the add they list ram limitations for different os's but when they get to 10  they say no such limitations exist

[mariushm]

They kinda are, in the sense that AMD won't really update drivers for Windows 10 for such old hardware

 

The integrated graphics in the 880g chipset will not have a driver with all the hardware accelerations - you'd be stuck with the default basic video card driver that lets you set resolutions maybe watch movies , basic 2d acceleration, but you wouldn't be able to play 3d games on the integrated card.

There may also be some drivers for USB or for some features not available for Windows 10, but Windows 10 should work and run.

 

Oh, there's also the requirement for BIOS to have some UEFI extensions present,and not all motherboards of that time had these UEFI features in the bios. In that case, Windows 10 will probably not install.

 

 

[domisdom]

https://www.amd.com/en/support/chipsets/amd-8-series-chipsets/880g they have newush drivers but there is not too much info on what changes and im already running 10 64 bit and playing gears 5 in fhd on high mode and benchmarking pretty well with the gears benchmark tool

[domisdom]

is there a reliable bios update tool ? im runing american megatrends

[mariushm]

The one offered by the manufacturer / mobo maker should be fine.

 

Do you have bios update function inside the bios? If so, you just copy the bios on a usb stick formatted as fat32 (newer bioses recognize exfat and ntfs also) and it should work

In the past, on some stubborn systems I simply made a freedos cd using a cd-rw disc - see legacy cdrom and standard cdrom : https://www.freedos.org/download/ - and added the bios file and the programmer into the disc image.

After booting in FreeDOS , you just go in the folder where you put those two files and type the command to program.

 

IF you can't get the programmer from acer/foxconn you can go to other motheboard makers at motherboards from around that time (year) and try to find a motherboard that uses american megatrends bios.... look at the bios downloads and utilities and see if they offer a programmer.

 

But here's a more straight forward link : https://soggi.org/motherboards/bios-update-flash-utilities.htm

 

Just enter your bios and get your bios version first to get the right utility for your bios.

 

The above tools work for older pre-UEFI bioses ... for newer, you can go here : https://ami.com/en/support/bios-uefi-firmware-support/

and scroll down to For End Users: Multiple Support Options

see the links to the right.

 

 

[domisdom]

so the limit would be 16gb  strictly for my board specifically crucial had its info wrong saying 8gb and their isnt any serious bios updates  definitely none with UEFI    no overclocking the best thing i can figure out for a solution is ASRock 970M Pro3  motherboard that will take all of my current components and supports up to 64gb of ddr3 with overclocking 2000mhz+ . and should fit in my case  only $64.99 with free shipping on new egg and the pci ports are in a better configuration so my soundcard can go on top of my gpu instead of my gpu on top of my souncard . unblocking 1 of my gpu fans and utilizing the sheild on my sound card blocking interference from my gpu 

[domisdom]

4 minutes ago, domisdom said:

so the limit would be 16gb  strictly for my board specifically crucial had its info wrong saying 8gb and their isnt any serious bios updates  definitely none with UEFI    no overclocking the best thing i can figure out for a solution is ASRock 970M Pro3  motherboard that will take all of my current components and supports up to 64gb of ddr3 with overclocking 2000mhz+ .not that thats really possible

 and should fit in my case  only $64.99 with free shipping on new egg and the pci ports are in a better configuration so my soundcard can go on top of my gpu instead of my gpu on top of my souncard . unblocking 1 of my gpu fans and utilizing the sheild on my sound card blocking interference from my gpu