Will my i7 860 recognize 6 gb of ram?

I7-860 has nothing to do with it. Check your motherboard carefully, to be certain that your sticks are in the proper slots. Where you put the ram is important, and not obvious on Asus motherboards.

You mught use memtest86+ to check out each stick individually to be certain that you do not have a bad stick.

I have sticks installed in first 3 slots from left to right and they are seated firmly

What operating system are you using?

I am using windows 7 64 bit....I have switched the sticks around and it still says only 4gb installed in the bios so I dont have a bad stick

Your motherboard doesnt support triple channel memory. I'm not sure what happens in this case. Undoubtedly your memory would not be on the supported memory listing.

Have you upgraded the bios? There have been at least 1 update for memory issues.

What happens if you turn off dual channel in the bios?

I haven't updated the bios. how do I turn of dual channel in the bios? I checked my asus manual again, the ram I have is listed as being compatible

I have a Asus P6T X58 motherboard with 6 slots and 3 channels. In my manual, it says that due to Intel spec definition, XMP DIMMs and DDR3-1600 are supported for one DIMM per channel only. Your P55 motherboard has only two channels. Is your ram 1600? and, does your motherboard manual have the same caveat?

Dual channel is set by the bios if you have two sticks of ram, one in each channel. The extra stick will operate in single channel mode.

my ram is 1600...the manual does say that. Does that mean 6gb wont work, only 4 or 8 gb of ram?

I think it means that if you use the default XMP definition to get 1600 speed, you can only run two sticks. You could try setting the speed in the bios explicitly to less, like 1333 or 1066. Your performance will not suffer to any noticeable extent on a i7 cpu.

Ram is not explicitly 2 or three channel. It is sold in kits of two or three dimms to be used in two or three channel motherboards. If you have an odd extra dimm, that should be OK, it will just run in single channel mode. The extra ram is more beneficial than a couple of percent processor power.

Do you think flashing my bios could fix this? to get the bios to show 6gb instead of 4gb?

Purchase 1 more Stick of Ram and Insert it into the 4th slot. Problem Solved.

To be honest 4 GB is enough.But to get 6 GB RAM working on a P55 motherboard which has 4 DIMM slots you will need 2x2GB + 2x1GB I think.