I'm not asking a question, i'm posting this as a solution to frustrations to people who are suffering from this.
First and foremost my specs:
Mobo: ASROCk 990fx
FX8350
Windows 8 PRO
Ram - 2 sticks 1x corsair vengeance 8gb, 1x gskill ripjaw 4gb = 12gb
2x 6970's Sapphire
I was running a windows 8 pro install for nearly a year without any issues until this last week i noticed my memory total was randomly dropping to 4gb. I did do a few malware scans and removed/fixed a few things and I think that's where the problems began. First off this was happening when the computer would go to sleep and come back. A restart was fixing it. Now it just became permanently 4gb out of 12gb.
There's plenty of threads that will tell you to check your BIOS settings for memory remap and whatnot. And there's also threads that will tell you about going to msconfig and hitting advanced settings-> maxmem disabled. Didn't work. I even tried setting it to the max 12gb. Didn't work. I reiterate my computer was perfectly fine until these scans possibly messed up something. The reason i have an 8gb and 4gb different brand sticks is because I bought 32gb kit of corsair ram back a year ago but 3 of the sticks came bad and i didn't run memtest checks till 4 months after.. i'm no longer in the US at least for now and I can't RMA them without paying nearly as much as I did for them for customs. Anyways, the setup was working fine no issues whatsoever.
I tried a BIOS CMOS reset... didn't work. So I reformatted. Now this is where it gets funny. I didn't try this before reformatting.
1. I shut down, removed the RAM left on the 8gb stick in, installed windows and voila 8gb detected perfectly.
2. I inserted the next stick got into windows.... not 12gb but 10.3gb were avaialbe with still having 1.3gb in hardware reserve (still better than the 8gb I initially had). So i ran windows update and for some reason something messed up.... I had to do a system restore... I logged into windows and poof i only have 256mb of ram available 11.w/e is on hardware reserve again...........
So this time i recurred to the whole MSCONFIG-ADVANCED SETTINGS-> disabled max memory.
I logged back into windows all 12gb were this time available to use.
I have no idea what is happening aside from the window memory files being corrupted somehow causing these discrepancies.
Bottom line, before you RMA or w/e you do, try a reformat and try switching DIMMS for the Ram and trying each stick alone.
I first had my DIMM setup this way 2/4 slots. Now they're on 3/4 which normally is not a conventional setup, but hey it's working.
I hope this saves time for some people (I haven't slept in 48 hours and i spent the last 5 hours trying to figure this out without any real help online since most of the cases seemed to solve their issues by RMA which honestly seemed premature at least the few threads I read about.
Keep in mind, I did manually set RAM timings for each dimm corresponding to the correct timings for each stick. I'm not sure if every motherboard has the ability to do that, but this one works fine (And NO these corsair sticks were never in the approved or recommended list for this mobo... but they worked amazing for me except for the BSODS i had because of the 3 faulty sticks.)
Anyways, hope this helped.
Cheers
First and foremost my specs:
Mobo: ASROCk 990fx
FX8350
Windows 8 PRO
Ram - 2 sticks 1x corsair vengeance 8gb, 1x gskill ripjaw 4gb = 12gb
2x 6970's Sapphire
I was running a windows 8 pro install for nearly a year without any issues until this last week i noticed my memory total was randomly dropping to 4gb. I did do a few malware scans and removed/fixed a few things and I think that's where the problems began. First off this was happening when the computer would go to sleep and come back. A restart was fixing it. Now it just became permanently 4gb out of 12gb.
There's plenty of threads that will tell you to check your BIOS settings for memory remap and whatnot. And there's also threads that will tell you about going to msconfig and hitting advanced settings-> maxmem disabled. Didn't work. I even tried setting it to the max 12gb. Didn't work. I reiterate my computer was perfectly fine until these scans possibly messed up something. The reason i have an 8gb and 4gb different brand sticks is because I bought 32gb kit of corsair ram back a year ago but 3 of the sticks came bad and i didn't run memtest checks till 4 months after.. i'm no longer in the US at least for now and I can't RMA them without paying nearly as much as I did for them for customs. Anyways, the setup was working fine no issues whatsoever.
I tried a BIOS CMOS reset... didn't work. So I reformatted. Now this is where it gets funny. I didn't try this before reformatting.
1. I shut down, removed the RAM left on the 8gb stick in, installed windows and voila 8gb detected perfectly.
2. I inserted the next stick got into windows.... not 12gb but 10.3gb were avaialbe with still having 1.3gb in hardware reserve (still better than the 8gb I initially had). So i ran windows update and for some reason something messed up.... I had to do a system restore... I logged into windows and poof i only have 256mb of ram available 11.w/e is on hardware reserve again...........
So this time i recurred to the whole MSCONFIG-ADVANCED SETTINGS-> disabled max memory.
I logged back into windows all 12gb were this time available to use.
I have no idea what is happening aside from the window memory files being corrupted somehow causing these discrepancies.
Bottom line, before you RMA or w/e you do, try a reformat and try switching DIMMS for the Ram and trying each stick alone.
I first had my DIMM setup this way 2/4 slots. Now they're on 3/4 which normally is not a conventional setup, but hey it's working.
I hope this saves time for some people (I haven't slept in 48 hours and i spent the last 5 hours trying to figure this out without any real help online since most of the cases seemed to solve their issues by RMA which honestly seemed premature at least the few threads I read about.
Keep in mind, I did manually set RAM timings for each dimm corresponding to the correct timings for each stick. I'm not sure if every motherboard has the ability to do that, but this one works fine (And NO these corsair sticks were never in the approved or recommended list for this mobo... but they worked amazing for me except for the BSODS i had because of the 3 faulty sticks.)
Anyways, hope this helped.
Cheers
) there you go.
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