(not solved)Half of RAM being picked up by bios

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
D

dgoa2011

Honorable
Dec 6, 2013
6
0
10,510
Hi

As title says bios is only picking up half of my ram.

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-M52L-S3P v1.0
RAM : Kingston HyperX DDR2 800(1 4gb stick dual sided)
CPU: AMD x3 2.7ghz(socket am2)
OS: XP home edition 32bit

Been working for years until i decided to buy 2gb kingston hyperx ddr2 800. The 4gb stick was in slot 1 and i put the 2gb stick in slot 3, booted up pc and bios showing 3gb. Windows states this but then I guess it will if bios is. Memtest86+ shows same but tests pass.

I've tried re-seating many times in each of the slots both together and individually to no avail. It's as if the bios is not picking up the second side of ram stick.
Reset bios with fail safe, default, optimised and jumper setting. Even took battery out and did it all again.

Bios has not been flashed yet as it was working fine before and the last thing I need is bios flash fail rendering pc useless.

I don't have more ram to test or another motherboard and can't afford to buy items with a trial and error approach. I believe Kingston have a life time warranty but the motherboard will be out of warranty so that is not even an option.

Even with the bios picking up 3gb(both sticks), 2gb(1 x 4gb stick) or 1gb(1 x 2gb stick) windows works fine and can play games etc.

Any ideas?
I will be at some point when i have time and don't need PC, taking the pc apart and checking ddr slots for damage and removing cpu just in case of movement and at the same time re-do the silver thermal paste.
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
RealBeast

RealBeast

Titan
Moderator
Sep 13, 2010
17,109
474
104,790


Why buy more than 4GB ram on a 32 bit system?

 
Upvote 0 Downvote
D

dgoa2011

Honorable
Dec 6, 2013
6
0
10,510
Regarding putting more than 4gb in, people i know claim to have more than 4gb in 32bit systems. However, regardless of what windows says the bios is no longer picking up the single 4gb stick as 4gb nor the 2gb stick as 2gb. Motherboard supports up to 16gb.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Shaun o

Shaun o

Illustrious
Oct 7, 2007
6,113
1
41,960
Some boards do not like you to have a single sided memory module with a double sided one. If you look at them one may only have memory chips populated on one side of the ram stick.

Once you hit over an amount of 4gb , if the bios of the board was reading it.
Memory remapping mode may need to be enabled in the bios.

You need to get a 64 bit version of windows xp or upgrade to windows 7 64 bit.
If you then get it working because it`s a waste of time and money at the moment running 32 bit os.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
RealBeast

RealBeast

Titan
Moderator
Sep 13, 2010
17,109
474
104,790
It does not matter what people claim, a 32 bit OS cannot use more than 4GB and the rest just sits there unused. Indeed, a 32 bit system will not even use the full 4GB.

Pull out the 2GB stick and put the 4GB stick back where it was working before the changes.

 
Upvote 0 Downvote
D

dgoa2011

Honorable
Dec 6, 2013
6
0
10,510
Ok thats fine but it still don't answer why when i put the 4gb stick on it's own the mobo picks it up as 2gb regardless of windows. As you know you can remove HDD and therefore OS does not play a part and bios will still show 2gb of a 4gb stick as does memtest86 booted from CD and therefore ignoring OS.

Any other ideas?
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
RealBeast

RealBeast

Titan
Moderator
Sep 13, 2010
17,109
474
104,790
If both the bios and memtest say that it is a 2GB stick, then perhaps it actually is a 2GB stick -- where did you buy it, and hopefully you aren't going to say EBay. Last week we had a poster that got a 500GB external drive in a 3TB housing.

 
Upvote 0 Downvote
D

dgoa2011

Honorable
Dec 6, 2013
6
0
10,510
It is a 4gb stick of Kingston HyperX Model : RHD2-1066AK2/4G bought brand new off Amazon a few years ago and was working as 4gb until recently. It has never worked as 1066 even though mobo supports 1066 but i thought that was because it was one stick instead of 2.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
RealBeast

RealBeast

Titan
Moderator
Sep 13, 2010
17,109
474
104,790
Your mothrboard will use 4x4GB and since it fails and if memtest says that it is 2GB, that is sufficient to RMA the stick and get a replacement from Kingston.

 
Upvote 0 Downvote
D

dgoa2011

Honorable
Dec 6, 2013
6
0
10,510
I was thinking that, maybe I'm just unlucky to have the 4gb fail and then a 2gb fail too. An update ...
Took PC apart today, removed motherboard and checked CPU and ram slots but couldn't find any damage. Looked for any sign of physical damage that might have happened and put it all back together again, reset CMOS and tried both sticks individually in all slots and then again both in together but still only showing half the ram per stick.
Not sure it's worth flashing bios as that can be risky and of course with it being dual bios if it fails the second should kick in.
One good point, it had one hell of a good clean and made space by removing full drives and redundant cables :)

Cheers for your help and advice.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
RealBeast

RealBeast

Titan
Moderator
Sep 13, 2010
17,109
474
104,790
Since your bios and memtest still don't recognize the sticks correctly, I would flash the bios (it is not risky if the power to your computer doesn't fail in the middle of the process) and then manually reset all of the memory settings.

 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom