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BIOS says 16gb installed, but only 8gb recognized

Retired
Not applicable
Hi there,

I have a thread over at the ubuntu forums about my asus g51jx-x2 (with g60jx mobo) not recognizing all 16gb of the installed ram.

After reading this blog post, however, this sounds like an ASUS issue, so I thought I'd try posting here. It is strange, because the BIOS definitely recognizes the 16gb of RAM, but will not report it to the OS. Has anyone else experienced this issue? I'm on firmware 206 and thinking about going to the latest 208, but wonder if it will change anything, this might be an inherent limitation of the system...

thanks for any help,
z
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6 REPLIES 6

Chastity
Level 10
Updating the BIOS shouldn't cause issues with your linux install. The memory controller for the i7 is built into the CPU (QPI), and not the motherboard. Since the BIOS is reporting 16GB, I would think that perhaps you need to update/config some core feature of the OS, tho updating the BIOS would be a good start.
[SIGPIC]Kicking Ass Since Today[/SIGPIC]

Retired
Not applicable
Thanks for the reply chastity. For the bios update, I was wondering if it would actually affect my problem or not, since the release notes for the firmware updates don't mention anything about this issue. I tend to stay away from any bios updates unless I specifically need them. I have read some horror stories about bricking these laptops during a bios update, but I believe those were all using the windows utility and I'll be doing the easyflash.

I'm not sure it is the OS, especially after reading the blog post I mentioned in my opening post. That person was using windows 7 an also tested on linux and had the same issue in both operating systems. Haven't heard back from asus support yet, I'll wait for them to weigh in before trying the bios update.

thanks
peace
z

Retired
Not applicable
I ended up running memtest86+ on a opensuse livecd and while it detected the RAM in the spd info it said that it was an unmapped device. ASUS never replied to my technical enquiry, so I called them and they said they couldn't help me if I wasn't running windows 7, so I was going to restore to the original shipped configuration, but decided to clean, swap, and reseat all the chips and that seems to have done the trick, all 16gb now recognized, phew!

Chastity
Level 10
So it turned out to be an OS misconfig issue. Good job on figuring it out. 🙂
[SIGPIC]Kicking Ass Since Today[/SIGPIC]

Retired
Not applicable
Actually I think it was a hardware issue. Perhaps the contacts weren't fully registered when I first installed it. After the cleaning job and a firm installation of the chips it worked like a charm w/o any OS tinkering. I'm glad I tried that first rather than reinstalling windows!
thanks
peace
z

vl_shevchuk
Level 7
Your laptop is equipped with Intel Core i7-720QM processor (Arrandale series). According to it's specification on http://ark.intel.com/products/49024 It can recognize maximum 8 Gb DDR3 1066\1333 MHz RAM. For comparison, Arrandale Core i5 processors are able to recognize 8 Gb of DDR3 800/1066 MHz RAM. Even Sandy Bridge Core i5 and Core i7 processors can use only 8 Gb DDR3 1066/1333 MHz RAM (ark.intel.com), so your expectations definitely pass ahead the time. If you want to buy a laptop with 16 Gb RAM support you need to wait at least for a year or assemble a desktop to yourself (some new desktop motherboards support up to 64 Gb RAM).
P.S. Some modern Sandy Bridge laptops have 16 Gb of RAM (4 slots for 4 GB). It's still secret for me how do they manage to bypass to the max memory limit of CPU, but it's obvious that four 4 Gb RAM blocks is not the same as two 8 Gb RAM blocks (integrated into CPU dual-channel memory controller can't recognize more than 4 Gb for each memory channel, so why it sees only 4 Gb from each RAM block and total amount of available memory is 8 Gb from 16).