How to lower Hardware Reserved

[Kamerex]

I tried a lot of things to get my ram to run at 3600mhz and use 16gb instead of just 8gbs. I have xmp enabled and running at 3600mhz, but it only uses 8gbs when booted up. 8gbs are stored in "hardware reserved" and I can't figure out how to lower the number. (noticed this on the twitch streamers pc business video, if not would have never found out.

[mariushm]

The right part of the picture is unrelated. 

The page file is an actual file used by the operating system to move stuff from actual ram into it, when the RAM gets full and applications request more memory.  Portions of ram reserved by applications that haven't been "touched" in a long time are silently written into the page file and the space in memory used by those portions is given to other pplications. This way you can have only 6-16 GB of memory, but you could have 50 programs all using 20 GB of memory in total, and your computer would not crash. 

 

The registry option at the top right in your picture does exactly as it says, it empties that page file when you shut down the PC. That option is pointless and will only cause wear on your boot drive, if it's a SSD, because every time you shut down, that page file (which could be anything from around 20 MB to a few GB) will be erased and at next start a new one will be created. Nothing wrong with that page file being reused, only time I could think of to want to erase the page file would be if there was some power loss and the page file is corrupted. 

 

As for the bottom right, that's kind of bad. You've disabled "Automatically manage page file" and you  set it to no paging, which means Windows is forced to stick to just the 16 GB of memory, and if a program requests more it will say no, and those programs may resort to using the disk space instead more.

 

For example, if you're using Chrome and you're opening 50 tabs or so,  Chrome will behave differently if it asks the operating system how much memory is available and the operating system says "16 GB in total , 5 GB free"   versus "32 GB total, 21 GB free" (if you set a 16 GB paging file).  If it knows there's only 5 GB free, it may be more aggressive and dump the contents of idle tabs to disk to free memory more often, so you end up with more data written to SSD. With page file, the operating system can give the same amount of physical ram to multiple applications and only dump to page file as needed (and often it compresses what's written to page file to write even less)

 

Some people recommend disabling page file if you use SSDs but that's stupid.

My advice would be to free some space on the SSD - you want at least 2% or so of free space on the SSD all the time either way, as lots of SSDs convert a portion of the free space into pseudo-SLC memory and use it as a write cache to speed writing to SSD.  

7 GB on a 500 GB SSD is quite low... I'd aim for at least 10 GB all the time kept free. 

 

I'd suggest setting a page file on the SSD or SSDs, to a fixed size (both initial and max set to same size).  In general, it's recommended for the page file to be 1.5x the amount of RAM but that's probably a bit too much.

I'd suggest setting a fixed 4 GB page file on your C: drive (check custom and put 4096 in both boxes), but only if you free some more disk space on your C drive - after these 4 GB are reserved for page file, you'd be left with only 3 GB of free space and that's too low.  You can see in the picture, even Windows suggest at least 1919  or around 2 GB of page file based on how you used the PC

I'd also recommend a second 4-8 GB page file on your other drive. 

This way you'd be up to around 8-12 GB of page file, which should be plenty for most games and applications. 

 

These may or may not fix the hardware reserved, but don't hurt your pc performance (besides blocking / reserving disk space on your SSDs)

 

I don't know your computer config so not sure what else to suggest 

I'd then suggest going in BIOS and checking if there's ram reserved for integrated graphics cards - if your cpu has integrated graphics and you don't use it, make sure in BIOS you set the maximum video card memory to the lowest value. 

make sure the ram sticks are actually in the proper slots - if your motherboard has 4 memory slots, put the ram sticks in the slot that's furthest away from the cpu socket, and then second stick goes in the third slot (leave one slot empty between ram sticks)

 

Also your ram seems to run at 2133 Mhz or at least Windows seems to think so... Use HWInfo and/or Aida64 to double check, and also check in BIOS.  If 3600 Mhz doesn't stick, there's nothing wrong with configuring the sticks at lower frequencies, try 3200 Mhz or even 3000 Mhz... it's still better than the default 2133 Mhz. 

 

You won't have 0 hardware reserved memory - drivers and components will reserve some amount of ram,  for example m.2 drives can reserve usually up to 64 MB, video cards may reserve 256-512 MB, sata drivers and usb controllers can reserve a few MB and so on...

 

 

[Kamerex]

"Also your ram seems to run at 2133 Mhz or at least Windows seems to think so... Use HWInfo and/or Aida64 to double check, and also check in BIOS." 

- Not really sure what I'm looking at, but is the clock of the memory is set to 1799mhz, is that what I should look at?

- in the BIOS, xmp profile is set to 3600mhz

[mariushm]

In reality, memory runs at half the value advertised. So if the memory manufacturer says it can do 3600 Mhz, they actually mean the sticks run at 1800 Mhz in reality.  They double it because the stick can transfer bits on both rising and falling edge of a clock pulse, which means they transfer 2 bits per pin with every Hz out of those 1800 Hz. 

All DDR (double data rate) memory sticks do as opposed to SDRAM and older memory types, manufacturers started advertising as double the real frequency to be a more pronounced difference between SDRAM and DDRAM and it kept going like that. 

 

So in your picture, it seems the sticks run at 1067 Mhz , which would mean 2133 MT/s or "fake" 2133 Mhz - the actual frequency and timings should be the ones circles in cyan (light blue, whatever). It seems the BIOS read all the SPD profiles from the memory stick and went from least good (the bottom of the list) all the way to the maximum supported, without enabling XMP - so your sticks probably run with 1.2v , and using the standard 1067 preset I also highlighted with same cyan color. 

The lines above with XMP in them, are XMP profiles, which you must enable. You may have to manually set the voltage to 1.35v but the motherboard should do it automatically when you enable XMP and choose one of the presets. 

Alternatively, you should be able to go in and manually configure the timings to the desired values - for example for 3600 Mhz you set 18-22-22-42-65  (but you should really get Aida64 and get the full list of timing values as this picture only shows the most important)

 

Being a B450 motherboard, I'd suggest however to start from a more conservative 3200 Mhz - the 1600 profile in the green bracket there, and if all works well, go up. 

 

Double check with Aida64 that memory runs at 2133 though, maybe I'm not reading the picture correctly.

 

 

 

[Kamerex]

7 hours ago, mariushm said:

In reality, memory runs at half the value advertised. So if the memory manufacturer says it can do 3600 Mhz, they actually mean the sticks run at 1800 Mhz in reality.  They double it because the stick can transfer bits on both rising and falling edge of a clock pulse, which means they transfer 2 bits per pin with every Hz out of those 1800 Hz. 

All DDR (double data rate) memory sticks do as opposed to SDRAM and older memory types, manufacturers started advertising as double the real frequency to be a more pronounced difference between SDRAM and DDRAM and it kept going like that. 

 

So in your picture, it seems the sticks run at 1067 Mhz , which would mean 2133 MT/s or "fake" 2133 Mhz - the actual frequency and timings should be the ones circles in cyan (light blue, whatever). It seems the BIOS read all the SPD profiles from the memory stick and went from least good (the bottom of the list) all the way to the maximum supported, without enabling XMP - so your sticks probably run with 1.2v , and using the standard 1067 preset I also highlighted with same cyan color. 

The lines above with XMP in them, are XMP profiles, which you must enable. You may have to manually set the voltage to 1.35v but the motherboard should do it automatically when you enable XMP and choose one of the presets. 

Alternatively, you should be able to go in and manually configure the timings to the desired values - for example for 3600 Mhz you set 18-22-22-42-65  (but you should really get Aida64 and get the full list of timing values as this picture only shows the most important)

 

Being a B450 motherboard, I'd suggest however to start from a more conservative 3200 Mhz - the 1600 profile in the green bracket there, and if all works well, go up. 

 

Double check with Aida64 that memory runs at 2133 though, maybe I'm not reading the picture correctly.

 

 

 

 

 

-Xmp has always been enabled and is stated to be up and running. I tried disabling, save and exit, then enabling, but it always shows that it isn't enabled in windows or HWinfo.

[VladTheImpaler]

Check you bios for any setting related to "memory hole" or "memory reserver" or "memory above"... Seems unlikely on modern systems, but that looks like the bios has reserved memory for legacy hardware..