Vista a 975x and 4 Gigabytes of RAM

I have a copy of RC1 installed. The motherboard is an Asus 975x. I’ve enabled the memory remap feature. It shows 4096 megs of RAM at the post prompt. However once I’m into Vista proper it only lists 3 gigabytes installed(this is the 32 bit version).

Is it a PAE issue? I can never remember the point where that needs to be turned on.

This is a famous Vista “feature.” Look for a fix in 2010 or so.

This is an artifact of the BIOS and other memory mapped hardware requiring memory addresses. It’s normal.

The 975x just won’t be able to make use of it? Is this true of the Badaxe2 or the 680i?

It’s not specific to any motherboard, but an artifact of backward compatibility with the original PC / PC-AT architecture. Memory mapped I/O addresses, hardware device addresses, GART, etc. all consume memory addresses (and in some cases, actual memory). That’s the memory you don’t “see” when you look at the Windows status information.

With 64-bit Windows, it’s not an issue any longer.

I’m not certain of this, but if you have PAE enabled and have more than 4GB, apps that use PAE can use the extra memory, but non-PAE apps won’t. Someone with some programming or sysadmin experience can chime in and verify this (or correct me if I’m wrong.)

Thanks Case :)