I have 12GB ram but only showing 3.5 used. Why?

[Matthew_Elwo]

Windows 7 64bit OS. Phenom II X4 965 3.40 GHz. 12.0 GB Installed memory. Nvidia GeForce GT 220 1GB Video card.

No matter how hard i tax my system the performance monitor maxes out at 3.5 GB in use. Though it says: Physical Memory: Total 12279, Cached 5537 Available 10000, Free 4500. (roughly) So why would it not use it if it knows that it's there?

 

[bob100684]

are you sure you have a 64 bit OS?

 

[cybertoad]

The opening post says it's a 64 bit Operating System, but he may be using a 32 bit application. These applications won't take advantage of the full amount of System memory. Just a thought.

 

[Matthew_Elwo]

Absolutely. And I've read dozens of these posts and never found an answer. It's baffling...

 

[Matthew_Elwo]

The opening post says it's a 64 bit Operating System, but he may be using a 32 bit application. These applications won't take advantage of the full amount of System memory. Just a thought.

How do i know if an App. is 32 or 64 bit? Like MW3?

 

[alvine]

some games will have a 64 bit mode, like crysis. i think there is just 32bit for the mw3...its not a ground breaking game...dx9...

 

[totalknowledge]

This probably has more to do with Windows pre-fetching. I have a feeling it will prefetch up to some hard coded limit. To go above that you have to find an application(s) that are using more than that much memory. Try opening lots of applications including web browsers with 15 or so tabs (assuming you have more than one kind of web browser on your system).

Open and then minimize all the games on your system. etc...

 

[Matthew_Elwo]

This probably has more to do with Windows pre-fetching. I have a feeling it will prefetch up to some hard coded limit. To go above that you have to find an application(s) that are using more than that much memory. Try opening lots of applications including web browsers with 15 or so tabs (assuming you have more than one kind of web browser on your system).

Open and then minimize all the games on your system. etc...

Genius. Every app will only use 3GB EACH. i opened 8 different games and it spiked to 7.2GB used. Thanks! And yes, most of my apps are running in 32bit, i noticed it says that under processes. thanks guys!

 

[venur]

Windows 7 64bit OS. Phenom II X4 965 3.40 GHz. 12.0 GB Installed memory. Nvidia GeForce GT 220 1GB Video card.

No matter how hard i tax my system the performance monitor maxes out at 3.5 GB in use. Though it says: Physical Memory: Total 12279, Cached 5537 Available 10000, Free 4500. (roughly) So why would it not use it if it knows that it's there?

Do you have a single 8G RAM bar ? Cuz they are known to have a lot of weird problem.

 

[gigabyter64]

Could also try either turning off page filing (virtual memory) in advanced system settings or reduce Paging down to say 500mb, this will force system to use only physical memory, but some apps do still require some page file to work correctly.

 

[jaquith]

Windows 7 64bit OS. Phenom II X4 965 3.40 GHz. 12.0 GB Installed memory. Nvidia GeForce GT 220 1GB Video card.

No matter how hard i tax my system the performance monitor maxes out at 3.5 GB in use. Though it says: Physical Memory: Total 12279, Cached 5537 Available 10000, Free 4500. (roughly) So why would it not use it if it knows that it's there?

You're fine. Don't confuse 'Free' with the amount of RAM available to Windows. 12279MB is 11.99GB to Windows, Cached is primarily for Shared System Memory to the GPU(s), Available is approximately Standby (goes down and Free is used up) + Free, In Use is the total of OS + Apps + files. To increase In Use open several large apps; [strike]4.5GB[/strike] 3.5GB is a lot of stuff opened as it is.

Windows 7 (Pro x64) Resource Monitor: