Motherboard memory issue

[NecroFlex]

So i sold a PC and the guy put his old one in the deal to lower the price, which i had no issues with.

 

So i came home, blew out some dust it had and powered it up. In the POST screen it showed 3200MB of ram, was strange since he said he has 4GB in it, 2x2GB. I went to the BIOS and yes, it showed 4GB in total (2x2048MB)

Went to Windows, it showed 4GB but only 3,12GB usable (Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit)

It's an older motherboard Asrock ConRoe945G-DVI and i thought the memory remap thing was the issue but i can't find it in the BIOS and it's the newest BIOS.

 

Anyone have any clues? Feels like it overall doesn't support 2GB sticks but it kinda works and at the same time doesn't.

[Lord Sephington]

Does the motherboard have built on discreet graphics? if so i think that may be your problem. as i have a system with 12gb DDR3 and it shows that i have 11.2gb available as my APU is drawing some ram usage for GPU power

[oskarha]

3 minutes ago, NecroFlex said:

So i sold a PC and the guy put his old one in the deal to lower the price, which i had no issues with.

 

So i came home, blew out some dust it had and powered it up. In the POST screen it showed 3200MB of ram, was strange since he said he has 4GB in it, 2x2GB. I went to the BIOS and yes, it showed 4GB in total (2x2048MB)

Went to Windows, it showed 4GB but only 3,12GB usable (Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit)

It's an older motherboard Asrock ConRoe945G-DVI and i thought the memory remap thing was the issue but i can't find it in the BIOS and it's the newest BIOS.

 

Anyone have any clues? Feels like it overall doesn't support 2GB sticks but it kinda works and at the same time doesn't.

Ive had the same problem before on a P945. Im quite sure that the G945 chipset does not fully support more that 3200MB of RAM.

[NecroFlex]

4 minutes ago, jaybob85 said:

Does the motherboard have built on discreet graphics? if so i think that may be your problem. as i have a system with 12gb DDR3 and it shows that i have 11.2gb available as my APU is drawing some ram usage for GPU power

it has and i tried giving it the minimum, which is 64MB but hasn't changed anything.

3 minutes ago, oskarha said:

Ive had the same problem before on a P945. Im quite sure that the G945 chipset does not fully support more that 3200MB of RAM.

I'll try different ram sticks (like 4x1) if anything changes.

[Torn]

This MOBO does support 4GB of RAM as will allot up to 192 MB for Video Memory. Do you by chance have a 1GB video card installed?

[NecroFlex]

4 minutes ago, Torn said:

This MOBO does support 4GB of RAM as will allot up to 192 MB for Video Memory. Do you by chance have a 1GB video card installed?

The card is a 4670 with 512MB

 

11 minutes ago, oskarha said:

Ive had the same problem before on a P945. Im quite sure that the G945 chipset does not fully support more that 3200MB of RAM.

From what i can see, the 3rd and 4th ram slots are dead, boots up fine with the 1st and 2nd one, but doesn't if the 3rd or 4th are occupied at all, the fans just continue to spin fast and it does sound like they try to slow down as if it wants to POST but they just spin up again.

[Torn]

3 minutes ago, NecroFlex said:

The card is a 4670 with 512MB

I'm assuming that the system can only address 4GB of total memory. 512 for your vid card, 192 for the onboard video and the remaining 3200 is usable. That only leaves another 192 unaccounted for.

[oskarha]

1 minute ago, Torn said:

I'm assuming that the system can only address 4GB of total memory. 512 for your vid card, 192 for the onboard video and the remaining 3200 is usable. That only leaves another 192 unaccounted for.

That is in no way how it works

The GPU has its own dedicated 512MB of VRAM which is on the PCB of the GPU itself.

The motherboard will deactivate the onboard graphics when it detects a dedicated graphics card.

The G945 chipset does not fully support 4GB of ram

[iRileyx]

Taken from the ASrock website for that mobo "Due to the chipset limitation, the actual memory size may be less than 4GB for the reservation for system usage under Windows® XP, Windows® XP 64-bit, Windows® Vista™ and Windows® Vista™ 64-bit."

I'm guessing as its an older mobo that page hasn't been updated to include windows 7 32 and/or 64 bit.

[oskarha]

1 minute ago, RKRiley said:

Taken from the ASrock website for that mobo "Due to the chipset limitation, the actual memory size may be less than 4GB for the reservation for system usage under Windows® XP, Windows® XP 64-bit, Windows® Vista™ and Windows® Vista™ 64-bit."

I'm guessing as its an older mobo that page hasn't been updated to include windows 7 32 and/or 64 bit.

The statement is probably valid for 7 aswell, so that explains the issue

[NecroFlex]

3 minutes ago, oskarha said:

The statement is probably valid for 7 aswell, so that explains the issue

Never had this issue before tho and on quite a few mobo's it said that sentence.

But yeah, guess that the mobo is just too old for this shit