GA-H55M-UD2H & 4GB memory

[Azza]

Why has it now increased to reserving more memory?

Used to be 133MB when using F4 BIOS, and now with F10 it is using 137MB.  


Why do you boards do this when every other H55 board by different manufacturers don't do it?  

[Dark Mantis]

Hi
Are you talking about RAM memory?

[rseiler]

Yes. There's an exhaustive thread about it here that should answer all questions, except why this problem exists.
http://forums.tweaktown.com/gigabyte/39790-possible-use-full-4gb-ga-h55m-ud2h.html

[Azza]

Yep I am Dark Mantis, and I am using a dedicated graphics card.


Thanks for the link rseiler.

[Dark Mantis]

Well that was an interesting read and I must admit something that I hadn't come across before. I really can't understand the reasoning behind this at all. Obviously if you are using onboard graphics then you are going to tie up some memory but to just reserve it for goodness knows what is totally incomprehensible. Sorry guy's can't be of any assistance, I would suggest asking GTS.
I don't know if absic or anyone else has come across this problem before if they have maybe they will post.

[rseiler]

It is puzzling. I'm not even sure it should be happening if you are using integrated graphics, since wasn't that problem solved years ago by a memory remapping feature in the BIOS (not necessarily Gigabyte's)?

Also, what about other Gigabyte H55 boards?  If they don't show this problem with 4GB, then it should be a bug. If they do, then maybe it's something Gigabyte hasn't figured out yet about the Intel Core line. Note that the problem magically goes away when you have 8GB.

[Dark Mantis]

Yes it is weird to say the least. The graphics memory that we were discussing is used on a dynamic need basis. As you quite rightly said the old method of reserving ram for use by the graphics chip on a dedicated basis has gone now but obviously the memory still has to come from somewhere and is taken as needed.
I am afraid our Gigabyte employee and Moderator of this forum, runn3R, is on holiday until next week so we can't get an answewr from him regarding this. You could try GTS as I suggested earlier but they are notoriuosly slow to answer even though we take most of the pressure off them on this forum.

[tomkaten]

Hi guys, sorry to revive this thread, but after some extensive research, it seems that ALL i3 processors coupled with H55 mobos from Gigabyte have this issue. It doesn't seem to be a Win 7 problem, but rather a BIOS one, as the BIOS itself seems to reserve that memory space. Not sure about boards from other manufacturers, but I think I recall reading about someone running into the same issue with an EVGA board.

If indeed this is the way all H55 boards coupled with Core i3 processors behave, then it might definitely be a hardware limitation imposed by the chipset, or actually the processor itself, as it hosts the MCH on-die, and Gigabyte might not be able to do anything about it.

I have an i3 560 and a H55M-S2 mobo from Gigabyte and I have the very same problem, 3.75 GB usable in Windows 7 x64 Ultimate.

It's not really an issue performance-wise, as I doubt the extra memory would have a major impact on anything, but it is somewhat annoying that no "official" position is taken on this. This could probably be fixed with a BIOS update, but F4, the latest one for my board, only "improves memory compatibility".

So, to conclude: this is probably a matter of system memory being reserved by the on-die graphics chip, but it's rather silly to not be able to control it, since most people use this combo with discrete GPU's. The Bios option that controls this is simply not there.

[Dark Mantis]

"improves memory compatibility".

I just wanted to mention that these BIOS update information tags are very brief and often do not give the full picture of what is covered by the file.
I really don't understand why they can't be more descriptive and in depth but it is not just a problem with Gigabyte, most manufacturers are the same.

[tomkaten]

I really don't understand why they can't be more descriptive

They're probably saving those amazing English skills for the truly worthwhile stuff, like manual and leaflet printing

[Lsdmeasap]

The memory reserve is due to the chipset, and the amount reserved depends on the CPU used, as noted in the thread linked above and in this thread
http://forums.tweaktown.com/gigabyte/41075-possible-use-full-4-gb-ga-h55m-s2hp-2.html