Computer with alzheimers

andrewwalker27 · l33t Joined: 27 Jun 2005 Posts: 660

To be honest it might be me rather than my computer! This is nothing actually to do with Gentoo, just a hardware issue, but I thought someone might be able to help me out. I have an old Asus M4A88TD motherboard with four RAM slots, each one has a four 4G DDR3 in it but my motherboard only seems to see 8G RAM. If I only put one in it only sees 2G, how is this even possible? As they were bought in pairs, could this mean they are only 4G in pairs, could they be 2G despite the label saying otherwise? Is there any way of actually telling what they are from linux, the BIOS agrees with what kinfocenter says, that there is only 8G onboard. I did find this in dmesg

Zucca · Posted: Fri Mar 22, 2019 1:14 pm Post subject:

Sounds like some RAM redundancy (mirrored) configuration.

I do not have answer, but back in time when I visited Archipelago, I had this problem on my server (which does not have ECC memory). I have 16Gigs there, but only 8Gigs was shown. IIRC lshw was the only thing that actually showed that I had 16Gigs of total memory. Everything else top/htop/free showed 8Gigs.
After switching back to Gentoo the problem vanished.

Now thinking of it... If it was somekind of RAM mirroring... I'd like to bring it back on my server. It barely uses more than 2Gb. Redundancy is more important to me.

So. Basically I came here to see how this ends up. Very relevant to my interests.
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Verdazil · Posted: Fri Mar 22, 2019 1:15 pm Post subject:

You can first of all try with the default BIOS settngs (frequencies and voltages) for memory. There are also miracles happen, for example, swapping modules...
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krinn · Watchman Joined: 02 May 2003 Posts: 7470

you might get your answer from software, sys-apps/lshw will gies you memory infos, i've seen some usb key or hdd intentionaly wrongly label (you know the external 1TB hdd that have a stupid 4Gb usb key inside), they generally don't take time to actually change the infos, just the label.

andrewwalker27 · l33t Joined: 27 Jun 2005 Posts: 660

My bad, on a closer look at the ram the was some small print under the 4G DDR3 text, it said in tiny writing (2 x 2G set)! That will teach me not to try and read something without my glasses, wish I'd seen that when I bought the damn things!
I bought them nearly 10 years ago and only just noticed, it's a bit late to return them though, I'll be a bit more careful next time I buy ram!