4GB RAM showed less in BIOS & Vista 64-bit..

Hi everyone,

Cut it short, I had the latest 1.3508 BIOS, Vista Ultimate 64-bit installed on my Aspire 5570, throw in new 2x2Gb 667Mhz RAM, yet BIOS and Vista only shows 3062Mb of available physical memory instead of 4096Mb. But CPUz dump file below did show what i exactly hope for.

Chipset
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Northbridge Intel i945GM rev. 03
Southbridge Intel 82801GHM (ICH7-M/U) rev. B0
Memory Type DDR2
Memory Size 4096 MBytes
Memory Frequency 333.4 MHz (1:2)
CAS# 5.0
RAS# to CAS# 5
RAS# Precharge 5
Cycle Time (tRAS) 15
Bank Cycle Time (tRC) 21

The question is : am I really 'using' 4Gb or RAM or just the 3062Mb as stated? or did i missed out any important step to make full use of the installed RAM here?

Really hope to get some insight from other users here. Thank you in advance..

 

some motherboards and and Bios's can only support a certain amount, the one you have may need to use some RAM for its own purposes, EG: some SLI motherboards need to take away 256Mb to run SLI etc...

 

Well, I did check the user manual before, it says that my aspire 5570 does support maximum of 4Gb RAM, and a system scan from Crucial.com confirm this. It would be ridiculous to assume Vista or BIOS is allocating nearly 1Gb of my RAM for other devices of a not so high-end laptop (built-in GMA950 & etc.) which did not happened with my previous installation of XP... or I might be wrong about this..

 

Are you sure you have the latest drivers installed? You must install windows updates. I found out these may be the cause of your problem. Initially, vista detected only 2.96GB of ram. After lots of windows updates, it detected all the 4gb of ram.

 

thanks luke, but i had already installed all the windows update available yet it still shows 3062Mb. Really wonder could the previous ZR1_3223 (1.3223) BIOS version specifically for Vista available on Acer website is the answer to this question compare to the latest 1.3508 BIOS I'd installed?

 

Have a look in your bios under northbridge configuration and see if there is an memory remap option. If there is enable that.
Thanks

 

You're stuck with the 3318MB (roughly) that your chipset will have available. While it "supports" 4GB, the 945 chipset is a 32bit chipset and thus, you have less than 4GB available. This is a hardware limitation, not a software one. Acer hasn't released a bios that allows for memory remapping so we're both stuck (I also own the 5570).
I'd also like VT in this model considering I have a VT enabled processor but they won't make a bios that allows this functionality either.
I can't remember which bios I have that shows the 3318MB available. I think you might have a newer bios than I have, I'm running 1.3505. I know that the last bios I looked at (1.3808), did limit to 3GB since there was an issue with using 1.3505 that allowed to see 3318MB and doing a fresh OS install (drove me nuts!). It would just blue screen all the time.

 

hmm.. if you said so, then pity that Acer had gave us false impressions regarding this particular matter. Yes goofball, I'm quite disappointed just like you that nothing much we can do with our BIOS options, no VT enable function and others as well as the memory remap.. what a sad thing.. :|