Ram Capacity Issues

[rokenrock]

Hi-

 

I recently upgraded to a Ryzen 9 7950x, and I've noticed some issues with ram capacity. I'm using Windows 11 and have been since before the upgrade.

I have two 16gb dimms, totaling 32gb, but something is wrong.

 

This is a view of my users tab in task manager. There is only one user:

I'm apparently using 52% of my ram, and changing to percentages, I find out that that 2gb of ram being used is equivalent to 30%. Meaning I have about 7gb of usable ram with the system using ~1. That means barely half a dimm is even available.

 

 

Does anyone have any idea what might be happening?

 

[SquintyG33Rs]

did you download and run memtest? aida64 also has a built in memory test.
there was a recent bug I think i saw something about with memory usage I don't quite remember what driver or windows update was causing it

[Kilrah]

How much "hardware reserved" on the memory page of task manager?

[SquintyG33Rs]

5 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

How much "hardware reserved" on the memory page of task manager?

good point, maybe you didn't realize you set iGP to hold 32GB hostage in bios. I forgot the 7000 all had graphics built in.

[Kilrah]

For such a big amount it's more that sometimes a RAM stick or the CPU socket can make a bad contact, leading to the stick being detected but not usable. In that case it'll show the whole stick's worth in Hardware reserved.

[SquintyG33Rs]

Just now, Kilrah said:

It's more that sometimes a RAM stick or the CPU socket can make a bad contact, leading to the stick being detected but not usable. In that case it'll show the whole stick's worth in Hardware reserved.

I thought it didn't boot properly when that happened because it would try to address it and crash.

[rokenrock]

2 hours ago, Kilrah said:

How much "hardware reserved" on the memory page of task manager?

I'll check this out when the memtest is done. Looks like it's taking about an hour per test, and I started like 10 minutes after the suggestion came in.

 

2 hours ago, SquintyG33Rs said:

good point, maybe you didn't realize you set iGP to hold 32GB hostage in bios. I forgot the 7000 all had graphics built in.

I haven't really messed around all that much in the BIOS- all I've done is enable the equivalent of XMP. I'm using the gigabyte b650 aorus elite ax- might pry around.

 

2 hours ago, Kilrah said:

For such a big amount it's more that sometimes a RAM stick or the CPU socket can make a bad contact, leading to the stick being detected but not usable. In that case it'll show the whole stick's worth in Hardware reserved.

I can definitely try to re-seat them. I'll have to remove one of the fans off my NH-D15 first though.

[rokenrock]

@SquintyG33Rs@Kilrah

 

I did the memtest- it passed with no errors in any test.

I re-seated the memory- no change.

I checked my memory, and this is the result:

 

Does the memory tab provide any useful information?

[Kilrah]

Everything looks perfectly normal there.

[rokenrock]

There's no way I'm just doomed to have a fourth my capacity...

[-rascal-]

8 minutes ago, rokenrock said:

There's no way I'm just doomed to have a fourth my capacity...

 

Your latest screenshot says it's fine now....

9GB / 31.1GB used = ~30%.

 

It's 31.1GB instead of ~32GB because  ~0.9GB is hardware reserved.

[rokenrock]

1 hour ago, -rascal- said:

 

Your latest screenshot says it's fine now....

9GB / 31.1GB used = ~30%.

 

It's 31.1GB instead of ~32GB because  ~0.9GB is hardware reserved.

It said that before. That's why I'm so confused. The ram may be upgraded, but the capacity isn't- I can almost certainly say that I've never seen 9gb being taken idly. About 7gb is being exposed to me as a user, as I can tell from switching between percent and values. Technically it would be more like 5 or so since there's a mystery 2gb that I assume is just windows backend separate from any user.

I can get a few screenshots, but I just tried swapping ram slots and now my system is stuck kinda living with no output and a red DRAM light.

[SquintyG33Rs]

3 hours ago, rokenrock said:

It said that before. That's why I'm so confused. The ram may be upgraded, but the capacity isn't- I can almost certainly say that I've never seen 9gb being taken idly. About 7gb is being exposed to me as a user, as I can tell from switching between percent and values. Technically it would be more like 5 or so since there's a mystery 2gb that I assume is just windows backend separate from any user.

I can get a few screenshots, but I just tried swapping ram slots and now my system is stuck kinda living with no output and a red DRAM light.

I really don't know what you're experiencing man. the screenshot looks exactly like it should look like so it's hard to get a read on anything.

[Kilrah]

7 hours ago, rokenrock said:

as I can tell from switching between percent and values.

Percents show percent of committed memory, not percent of total available. 

 

Again nothing wrong, and 9GB used with browser, discord and whatever other typical programs you have is pretty normal when you have 32. Programs tend to overcommit more the more RAM you have "just in case" since that memory is unused anyway.

[rokenrock]

4 hours ago, Kilrah said:

Percents show percent of committed memory, not percent of total available. 

 

Again nothing wrong, and 9GB used with browser, discord and whatever other typical programs you have is pretty normal when you have 32. Programs tend to overcommit more the more RAM you have "just in case" since that memory is unused anyway.

That's not true though. (Testing here on my laptop since my pc is still blackscreened)

My laptop has 16gb of ram btw.

 

Dividing the ram amount shown in values by the percent shown in percent mode, and multiplying that by 100, each one has ~7600mb (Values aren't exact since I couldn't have them up at the same time) available to it. Even just taking into account the first five, that would be over double my physical capacity.

 

 

Speaking of, it seems to also be happening to my laptop. It might just be the newest version of Windows 11.

 

This time there's not too much phantom memory usage.

Doing some back of the napkin math, that's 7,689mb of available space total. That's quite similar to my desktop's available space... it might really just be windows 11.

 

[Kilrah]

2 hours ago, rokenrock said:

Dividing the ram amount shown in values by the percent shown in percent mode, and multiplying that by 100, each one has ~7600mb

You don't understand, the percentages represent percentages of RAM used by apps.

Here Chrome is using 2.7GB of RAM, and in percentage it's 14.7%, but that's not 14.7% of the RAM in the system, it's 14.7% of the 18.2GB RAM committed by all processes which you can see on the memory tab.

 

[rokenrock]

4 hours ago, Kilrah said:

You don't understand, the percentages represent percentages of RAM used by apps.

Here Chrome is using 2.7GB of RAM, and in percentage it's 14.7%, but that's not 14.7% of the RAM in the system, it's 14.7% of the 18.2GB RAM committed by all processes which you can see on the memory tab.

 

OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. That makes WAY more sense.

So it's just the least useful statistic in task manager and deviates from the pattern of every other single statistic.

Is that just a windows 11 thing? There's no way I wouldn't've noticed that over the years of using windows 10...

Thank you for the clarification- do you happen to know of a way to make it % of capacity?

[Kilrah]

It's the same in Win10 at least currently, and I'm not aware of it having been different before. Doubt you could change it.

It does seem pretty logical to me that percentages would be relative to used to be able to see more easily how much an app is using compared to others.