Gigabyte (Fujitsu-Siemens) GA-8I915PM Revision 2.0

[conrad1on]

I don't know if this is the right place to ask this - or even if this is actually possible - but I was wondering if an option could be added to my motherboard's BIOS to enable memory remapping?

Unfortunately, no such option currently exists in my BIOS (Award Software version 10Q). I even managed to upgrade it, but it didn't add any new menu options.

I'm having a problem getting my motherboard to recognise the full 4 GB of RAM that's installed - currently, in the 'basic information' window in the Control Panel, my 'Installed memory' is listed as 4.00 GB (3.25 GB usable). In the Resource Monitor, which gives more detail on how the RAM is shared out, 'Hardware Reserved' is marked at 769 MB, which looks suspiciously like the missing chunk. I'm told that my motherboard should be able to recognise the full 4 GB, but the lack of memory remapping in the BIOS options is preventing me from knowing for sure.

Does anyone know if 10Q is even the most recent version of this particular BIOS? If there's a more up-to-date version out there that has extra options, that may be the best solution.

Failing all of that though, could I completely replace the BIOS with another type altogether that might have a remapping option?

Any advice whatsoever on this would be much appreciated, as I hate thinking that I've blown £50 on extra RAM for nothing.

[TheWiz]

A lot of people ask about this on our forums, its a common issue. While many like to point fingers at the BIOS though, it's sometimes software related. Normally a 32bit operating system can't always address 4 GB of ram, so this may be part of the problem (if you ahve a 32bit os) Also, hardware reserved seems to indicate you may be using a shared graphics onboard that is using graphics ram out of your standard memory pool.

Please confirm these things with some screenshots,

Thanks,
TheWiz

[conrad1on]

Thanks for the quick reply.

I should have mentioned that I was using the 64-bit version of Windows 7 (Home Premium).

With regards to the theory about a certain amount of memory being diverted elsewhere: previously, as an experiment, I took out two 1 GB sticks of RAM and replaced them with a 512 MB pair to take the memory down to 3 GB - but otherwise leaving the rest of the hardware the same - and when I had a look in Resource Monitor after booting up, it showed only a negligible amount (1 MB) of memory marked as 'Hardware Reserved', which made me doubt that my old graphics card was a factor.

Here's what my computer's Resource Monitor looks like currently:

[TheWiz]

What kind of grpahics card are we looking at. If its AGP what is the aperature set to ?

[conrad1on]

It's an ATI X550LE LP 256 MB, should that mean anything to you.

As for the aperture, I have literally no idea what that means.

[1234s282]

As you can see from the screenshot , it displays installed ram as 4096mb so it can see it all but just not use it because you are running 32 bit windows as previously explained by TheWiz

Admin

[conrad1on]

Am not:

[TheWiz]

Well thats an onbord GPU I'm pretty sure so theres 256mb, leaving 512mb to still be accounted for. Have you read this documentation.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/978610/

TheWiz

[conrad1on]

I think I probably have read that before, as much as any of it means to me. I'm pretty sure I've tried everything it suggests too, bar memory remapping of course.

[TheWiz]

I'll check a bit further, but I'm pretty sure its because of your GPU.

TheWiz