X99 Extreme4 even less memory availabe to 32-Bit OS after 1.80 BIOS

[CSAsr84]

I have installed Windows 7 Home Premium 32-Bit on another HDD for some older games. The problem is after I updated to BIOS v1.80 the available Ram reduced to 1.43GB from 1.90GB I had with v1.60 (Which was already bad cause with the same VGA (GTX 650 1GB) I had 3.25GB available on my previous PC). I am sure it is the new BIOS that cause that cause if I move the BIOS selector jumper to chip B which remained at v1.60 Ram returns to 1.90GB available.

Does anyone know any reason Ram is less that 3GB anyway (16GB installed)? Thank you for your time.

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Re: X99 Extreme4 even less memory availabe to 32-Bit OS after 1.80 BIOS

Did you check the difference in memory usage between the BIOS versions in Windows Resource Monitor?



The 32bit versions of Windows are not able to address more than 4GB of RAM memory. The 32bit versions cannot store the address (an integer number) of RAM memory locations beyond 4GB. Sounds ridiculous but is true.

[CSAsr84]

Re: X99 Extreme4 even less memory availabe to 32-Bit OS after 1.80 BIOS

Yes but I think I didn't use the correct words cause I have the Greek version to remember how it is written. Let's see with screenshot:



I know the 32-Bit Ram limitation but I am curious why on X99 chipset I have less than 2GB Ram usable when I had on my previous P35 chipset 3.25GB usable with the same VGA.

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Re: X99 Extreme4 even less memory availabe to 32-Bit OS after 1.80 BIOS

Nice screen shots, but the CPU-Z information in the top and bottom sections both show BIOS P1.80. That doesn't matter, we can see the difference in the memory information.

The top section shows 1.90GB available, the bottom 1.43GB available, just as you said in your first post. The Total numbers are 1,941 and 1,461. The difference is 480GB.

Just looking at the numbers:

Hardware Reserved (grey) is 14443 (top) and 14923 (bottom), the difference is 480GB. Not much point in comparing the other numbers, that seems to be the main difference.

What Hardware Reserved is, is difficult to know, and is a combination of things.

We can also see the In Use (green) amounts are different, more on the bottom, and so is the Standby (blue), for a total of 272GB more on the bottom.

One other thing to look at, is in the Performance Information and Tools information you have in both the top and bottom sections. If you scroll down to the Graphics detail section, you might find a difference in Shared Memory.

You can't compare the P35 chipset board with the X99 chipset board, they are very different in so many ways. Even the type of firmware on each one, BIOS and UEFI, will cause differences in the amount of memory used by the system. All the different hardware and features on the X99 board use memory, more than the P35 board.

The 1.80 BIOS might be reserving more memory for the NVME support, and things not listed in the description. If you need the extra memory, and don't need the features in 1.80, use 1.60.