Asus C90S vs. 4Gb of RAM

I recently purchased myself a Asus C90S on impulse.

Found it on a "buy & sell" forum and had some money over, so thought I could use it as a little workhorse. A laptop I really didn't need to be picky about. Something I could send my kernel compiles to, do some occational gaming on (never had a GPU capable to game before, and, really didn't care either).

So, found it, two hours later I had it and started investigating. Looked up reviews, checked here on the forum, etc etc.

Got sooo disappointed when I read it didn't support 4Gb RAM. I need 4Gb so I can run a few virtual machines, do some compiling and stuff. Then I started looking a bit behind the scenes.

BS! All that jibberish saying "It will never, and can never, support 4Gb of RAM because it ONLY has a 32bit south bridge...." yadda yadda yadda. On it went.

I got a beautiful little Sony laptop that also has a 32bit southbridge, and 4Gb of RAM works just fine. 32bit CAN adress 4Gb, but, there is the limit.

Ohh well. 64 bit Vista and 64bit Linux supports it well enough.
What I'm so freaking angry about is that the **** GPU steals 1.2Gb of my RAM. I haven't found any way to disable it either.

Here's a screenie from Vista 64bit. Enjoy.

 

Nice. Isn't the shared memory freed when it is needed by system apps, and it is not needed by the GPU? That's how I'd implement that feature. But I don't know, just asking.

 

Shared GPU memory still shows up in the OS, if you have a 64-bit OS, or less than 3GB RAM.

You can have the GPU to share 1.2GB and install only 2GB RAM, and you will still get the full 2GB memory addressed.

It is the 32-bit limitation (memory-mapping), which is causing the 1GB to be unaddressed, and not only the GPU. (In msinfo32 > H/W Resources > Memory, you can see what devices are eating up the memory resources....)

ASUS knows about this, so they already defined a max memory support of 3GB, unlike other manufacturers, who still state 4GB Support on 945 chipset computers.

 

System settings say 4Gb of RAM.
TaskMan say 2.8Gb of usable RAM.
nVidia driver steals 1.25Gb of RAM.

Looks like 2.8 + 1.25 = 4.05Gb RAM.

Or, do you actually mean, although I can see 2.8Gb in TaskMan that 1.2 of those are shared with my GPU? *feeling fooled, again*

I will have to boot into linux, pull up a few virtual machines and see how high I can go until it says my RAM is maxed out.

 

The shared memory has nothing to do with it. It is due to memory-mapping of the various I/O devices including the GPU, wifi card, card reader, Lan card, etc etc. As you remove these components, you will free up memory resources, and you will see more RAM addressed in windows.

Shared Memory still shows up in the OS. It cannot be used by the OS, but it will show up in Device Manager, and System Info.

 

I can see my 4Gb in SysInfo, just as you say. 1.2Gb missing from that in TaskManager and we got our 2.8Gb. Hence, the 4Gb of RAM is used in the end after all. Bugger, didn't want to share away with the GPU.

 

Can you attach a screenshot of Msinfo32 (System Summary) as well ?

http://www.intel.com/Assets/PDF/datasheet/307502.pdf (Pg. 211)

 

Doesn't look good

Weird I haven't noticed missing memory on the Sony.
Although, I haven't really used it heavily either. Gotta check it out later and see if I limit out on 3 - 3.5Gb

 

Yep. Have been all over the chipset specs many times before the past few years. I just bought it because it was cheap anyways. £40 for 2x2Gb. It's about ten pints. I think I'll survive without them this week. Still, I got fooled by avalible RAM I saw. I should be ashamed of myself.

 

There is nothing really that can be done about it. If possible, you could try upgading to a Santa Rosa or above, as these were true 64-bit platforms.

 

Yeah, I guess. Well, the 4Gb are used, in some way at least.

 

Well yeah, at least the two modules will be running in 'True' Dual Channel Mode.