Hi, I have a a ZOTAC ION with 4 GB of RAM (2 sticks). However, the BIOS and OS only show ~3200MB. (With one 2GB stick it's 1791MB -- reported by Memtest86+). If it were a constant number such as 512MB that was missing, I'd hypothesize that its due to the graphic card having shared memory (even though I'm fairly sure that it doesn't). As it is, I'm left wondering where the hell did my RAM go to...

thanks,
Serafean

PS : I run 64-bit Gentoo

how much RAM does your hardware support?

Certainly sounds like motherboard graphics using shared memory. Unfortunately, it sounds like you also have a second issue taking away even more memory.

The motherboard or BIOS might not support ram remapping, so when you have a full 4GB installed, that might take away a big chunk (ballpark .5GB). That doesn't explain any of the missing ram that you have when only one 2GB stick is installed. So I think you have two distinct problems.

The remapping might be a BIOS menu option rather than a permanent restriction. So you might salvage about .5GB by changing some BIOS menu option. Unfortunately, there is no consistent naming for that option across BIOS's, so it is hard to tell you what to even look for in the BIOS menu.

AlucardZero : According to the manual, up to 4GB...
I found something that looked like it might have something to do with GPU memory, and ended up disabling the video output completely... Now I'm off looking for the reset jumper, or searching screenshots of my BIOS...

Serafean

Ok, back up, and with a 2GB stick, Memtest86+ reports 1983MB of memory available (BIOS defaults)

That usually means up to 3 and fraction GB of ram. If it supports only 4GB of physical address space, it can't support close to a full 4GB of ram.

That is common, but I think seriously dishonest, terminology by the motherboard manufacturer. If it supports up to 3.5GB, they ought to tell you it supports up to 3.5GB. But instead they will tell you "up to 4GB".

So there probably is no BIOS option to use the big chunk of ram that is lost by installing a full 4GB.

The smaller chunk of ram lost even when less than 4GB is installed is likely to be a different issue. But if you don't do well trying to disable shared ram for motherboard graphics, I don't know whether anything can be done about even that smaller chunk.

Do you have an actual graphics card? Or is graphics built into the motherboard? Or both?

its an ION platform, so it has an integrated nvidia GPU. However I thought it had dedicated memory...
So, with the 2GB stick, the amount of RAM available is 2048M - $(Reserved_for_framebuffer), as it should (if framebuffer=32M, MEM=2016M)
Now if I add the second stick (for a total of 4GB) with the same settings (fb=32), the amount of memory available is 3552M.

Thaks all,
Serafean

I think it is a shared memory deal. I have a q150 that acts like that.