missing ram

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by moominboy, Oct 6, 2005.

  1. moominboy

    moominboy Gigabyte Poster

    just installed a game, dawn of war, which requires a minimum of 256 MB RAM which i knew or thought i knew, i had. but it says error, needs 256 ram to run?

    so i used belarc advisor expecting me to be feeling a wee bit stupid when it confirmed what i'd thought. 256 MB in DIMM 1, but only 248 installed ram?

    any clues?
     
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  2. tripwire45
    Honorary Member

    tripwire45 Zettabyte Poster

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    It's just amazing what you can find on the Internet.

    http://www.f1gamers.com/f1/bb/?a=view&t=24307

    http://www.neowin.net/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t307601.html
     
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  3. moominboy

    moominboy Gigabyte Poster

    ha! you're gods gift to google trip!

    i did have a quick look but didn't see anything really. thanks mate, i'll have a wee nosy in bios.
     
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  4. hbroomhall

    hbroomhall Petabyte Poster Gold Member

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  5. Jakamoko
    Honorary Member

    Jakamoko On the move again ...

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    I wondered about that too, Harry, but as only 8Mb is going "missing", I can't imagine it's a gfx card chewing it up. :scratch
     
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  6. Boycie
    Honorary Member

    Boycie Senior Beer Tester

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    I have seen this once before. I put it down to faulty RAM to be honest, as when i replaced it with a stick of Crucial it saw all 512!
     
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  7. Neall

    Neall Byte Poster

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    Some older motherboards with onboard gfx will use 8MB of shared memory.

    This can be changed in the Bios.

    Saying that i havent seen this on any recent boards.

    Neall

    EDIT: Apparently this is common of newer boards too. Although i havent come across it before.
     
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  8. Veteran's son

    Veteran's son Megabyte Poster

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    I would have thought the same thing, Boyce! :)
     
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  9. Phoenix
    Honorary Member

    Phoenix 53656e696f7220 4d6f64

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    Hey forget the RAM, Dawn of War? good man! its a great game! :)
    *16 month Dawn of War Vet*
    *1 month Winter Assault Vet*


    I was leaning to shared video ram too tbh, ive seen that when trying to install XP on some choppy system with 64mb of ram with some shared, in hindsight it wasnt gonna run XP anyway :P
     
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  10. moominboy

    moominboy Gigabyte Poster

    dont think its a faulty stick boyce as ive just put in another 256 stick and belarc now sees 504 so i guess its the sharing, can anyone elaborate on the idea of shared video ram?

    well im going to have my first foray tonight phoenix and i cant wait to get winter assault soon! nice av btw!

    :offtopic
     
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  11. Neall

    Neall Byte Poster

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    Well basically your onboard video has borrowed about 8MB of memory from your RAM in order for it to perform better.

    You can adjust how much RAM your video card uses in the BIOS.

    The solution would be to buy a AGP video card as this will come with its own memory therefore not having to borrow from your RAM anymore.

    Neall
     
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  12. Phoenix
    Honorary Member

    Phoenix 53656e696f7220 4d6f64

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    do you actually have a real graphics card? i say real, because, those onboard things that borrow ram can hardly be considered real :)
    and chances are DoW will run like a DOG
    could be that you have an AGP card, but also onboard and its just still stealing memory its not using?
     
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  13. Neall

    Neall Byte Poster

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    I would have thought if you did have an AGP card then the bios would be clever enough to disable the onboard gfx.

    Might be worth a look though :)

    Neall
     
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  14. moominboy

    moominboy Gigabyte Poster

    no i dont have a real card folks, just a crappy fake one!

    oh well, looks like ebay is gonnabe getting some more of my money soon then.

    what type/vendor is would you recommend guys?

    bear in mind im skint-ish. :(
     
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  15. Baba O'Riley

    Baba O'Riley Gigabyte Poster

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    Some boards are smart enough to disable the shared RAM automatically, some are not in the same way some epople are smart enough to tie their own laces and some are not :) !
     
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  16. Phoenix
    Honorary Member

    Phoenix 53656e696f7220 4d6f64

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    Well last generation I was an ATI man, 9600XT/9800XT era
    I'm back to nvidia with the 6800 series and 7800 series now though
    so depends on what generation your looking to go for
    you can pick up brand new 9800s for under a ton, so ebay should be even better, what sort of expenditure are you looking at?
    DoW may only be an RTS but its a graphically heavy one, especially when the grounds exploding next to 4 fully armed squads of marines in ranged combat with an eldar base :)
     
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  17. moominboy

    moominboy Gigabyte Poster

    cheers for the info mate. it did indeed run like a dog but still, not many games have made me go "wow!" just the intro is awesome!

    ive just finished playing it for about 5 hours straight cos im knackered!

    ill go and have a wee look on ebay and see what i can see. :)
     
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