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A8V-X Memory Problem

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Hey all,

I am having a little problem with my Asus A8V-X motherboard. I have been running this board for about 7 months now with no problems what so ever. However I just recently purchased some more memory for my computer to hopefully get a little more performance increase and to ger ready for the Windows 7 release. here is my computer specs:

OS: Windows XP Home with SP3
Motherboard: Asus A8V-X
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 +3700 2.5ghz socket 939
Memory: 4gb (1gb x4) OCZ Platinum PC3200
Graphics Card: 512mb Saphhire Radeon HD3850 agp
Sound Card: VIA Envy24HF
Hard Drives: 200gb/(2x)500gb Western Digital 7200rpm 8mb cache IDE and 500gb Seagate USB External
Power Supply: Thermaltake 450watt TR2 RX Cable Management W0146RU

I had 2gb of memory before and just bought another 2gb kit. I know that Windows XP will only recongize 3gb of it, and it does. But my issue is that my bios only says that there is 3gb useable. If I open my Asus Probe via windows it detects that there is a 1gb stick in all four ram slots. My manual says that my motherboard supports 4gb of ram. (note that less then 3gb might be detected with running Windows XP 32bit). So my question is, it this just saying 3gb in the bios cause my motherboard recognizes that I have a 32bit OS on my computer or will this motherboard only use 3gb of ram? I ask becuase if it will only use 3gb, I might return it since I will have 1gb ram that is useless. My bios is up to date and everything like that as well. Any help/suggestions with this would be awesome! Thanks guys!

Chris Stickles

More about : a8v memory problem

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Hey all,

A little update. I have tired to switch out memory modules to different slots and test all of them, and they are all fine. As it stands right now when my computer posts it displays 2992mb ram as my bios settings are set currently. When i open my bios under system configuration it says 2992mb usable. If I go into my northbridge settings/memory configuration, if I enable Hardware Memory Hole and save settings, when my computer posts it displays 4048mb ram. Then when I enter bios under system configuration it says 2944mb useable. This doesnt make sense to me but oh well. Once again, is this due to maybe the motherboard detecting that I have a 32bit OS installed or something else. Hope this helps out some! Thanks guys!

Chris Stickles
Motherboard Authority
Memory Authority

Yes, you need to have the Memory remapping, or memory hole feature enabled in the BIOS, or the BIOS itself cannot map more than 3 gig of memory. However, it is usually software remapping you are looking for, not hardware remapping. Since that is an older board, it may be worded different though. Main thing is you want it to count 4 gig during POST. If you have both options, hardware and software, enable software only.
Once in Windows though, a 32 bit OS will only be able to assign address space for about 2.8~3.2 gig of your main memory. A 32 bit OS can use 4 gig, but you have to remember that your system has more memory than just your RAM. Video card memory, controller memory, IDE devices, etc.....they all have memory that must be addressed too. Windows will address all this memory first, because these devices must have their memory allocated to work. Whatever is left over, to make a total of 4 gig all together, is addressed from your RAM. But Windows does not report all this other memory as being used, it only reports how much RAM is being addressed.
After everthing else is addressed, most Windows users will find they have about 3gig of main memory available for use. If, for instance you added a second video card with 512 meg of memory on it, then Windows would show 2.5 gig of main memory, or RAM available.

Hey man,

Thanks for the advice! I got a copy of Windows XP x64 from a friend and at first it didnt detect all the memory either. Just went to the bios and enabled the hardware memory hole again and it detected all 4gb in x64. My bios still says only 2944mb usable in system information so good job to Asus, lol. It does make my ram jump down to 2.87gb from 2.92 in XP 32bit but oh well. So I am going to keep XP x64 on sense I got all my drivers on it and it seems to be running stable. Was going to get rid of XP 32bit but I figured it was on there and wasnt hurting anything so I will just dual boot in case I find something that doesnt work on XP x64 down the road. Thanks again!

Chris Stickles
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