AMD Usable RAM problem

[Gpat71]

Help Please.  Everyone has been raving about AMD laptops.  I bought an HP ENVY x360 convertable.

 

Of the 8G Ram only 5.9G is usable.  Its seems to be by design.

 

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c06526774

 

Never seen this mentioned in any reviews?

 

Anyone know how to fix it and get my memory back?

[genexis_x]

Your laptop has 3500U/3700U? Might be able to change the reserved RAM in BIOS

[Jumballi]

your laptop is probably using some of that ram as vram for the igpu, you can reduce it but it's heavily discouraged as it will impact the performance of anything that uses the built in video card.

[mariushm]

Yeah, go in bios and lower the memory reserved for graphics to 512 MB or 1 GB - most games won't care because the integrated graphics can use more than that reserved size either way, but there will be a small performance loss. 

 

Long term, your best option is to add a 8 GB or 16 GB so-dimm stick in the slot you should have empty. You can mix 8GB and 16 GB sticks, shouldn't be a problem.

[TheBean]

because your laptop has an iGPU (integrated graphics), the iGPU will reserve some of the system ram as its own memory. This is by design because iGPUs do not have separate ram. therfore, the system ram is shared and only some of it is useable by the user. 

[Gpat71]

Thanks.  The article refers to "This is by design. AMD reserves some memory capacity in order to support the Microsoft PlayReady feature.'

 

Anyone know what that means?  Surely this must be a widely experienced problem?

[mariushm]

3 minutes ago, Gpat71 said:

Thanks.  The article refers to "This is by design. AMD reserves some memory capacity in order to support the Microsoft PlayReady feature.'

 

Anyone know what that means?  Surely this must be a widely experienced problem?

Sounds like it's a DRM protection mechanism ... to protect streaming video solutions like Netflix and others so you won't be able to capture the content.

I doubt that's the reason ... yeah, probably PlayReady requires a minimum amount of memory allocated to the video card hence that's why it's configured like that, but if you disable PlayReady you can probably reduce that amount.