Are you using a 32bit OS? You will need a 64bit OS for all your 6GB to be recognized, otherwise it will only utilize ~3.2GB.

I'm using a 64 bit system with 12gbs and it only says 8 are usable. Is there something above 64bit?

No, but you may want to use a program such as CPU-Z to make sure that all of your sticks are recognized. You may have one that is not fully seated or for some reason not recognized by the system. You can also try running something like memtest86 to make sure the sticks are all good.

While it's not nearly as prevalent now, older boards (back around the P4 days) would only have 2 or 3 actual working RAM slots. While this is on the list of possible culprits, it's way down the list.

Win 7 Ultimate 64 bit
Core i7 920 @ 3.0 ghz
ASUS Sabertooth x58
Patriot Sector 7 1600 mhz 6gb
XFX Radeon HD 5670 1gb 775 mhz ... want a new card, but im broke

everything is recognized and all the drivers are up to date, but it will only use 3gb of the available 6 gb of memory.

so no one has anymore information as to this?

you sure your windows is a 64 bit version?

your problem is exactly what happens when you have more than 3 GB of ram memory on a 32bit OS.

i also have windows 7 ultimate and it sees all of my ram. i didn't have to do anything, i just put them in the slots and that was all.

What do you mean "it recognizes it, and seems to work fine, but it will only utilize 3gb". Does CPU-Z show you all the RAMsticks? Does taskmanager show 6GB?

Maybe some sticks are bad, or maybe some DIMMslots are bad, use memtest86 to check for bad sticks and swap out sticks to check for bad slots.

wow, took me a while to get back to this one. so. EVERYTHING CHECKS OUT FINE, it reads all my memory, and YES it is a 64 bit OS. everything says its there... it just doesn't use more than 60% of the memory. even when I run tests on it, the maximum memory that it utilizes during tests, gaming, or everything else is about 3500MB. not sure why. it just does not go up to even 4gb. i use CPU-Z, memtest, prime95.... all of it. its still the same. its not that big of a deal, it doesnt effect my computer, just thought i would look into it and see if i could get some more performance out of this pig.

go into msconfig, boot and advanced. make sure its not being set to 3 GB

finally some useful information. well not entirely, its not set to 3g. maybe i just havent run anything that needs that much memory or can utilize it. its not causing me problems so im not gonna worry about it anymore. thanks for the help though.

ShortAlieN wrote:finally some useful information. well not entirely, its not set to 3g. maybe i just havent run anything that needs that much memory or can utilize it. its not causing me problems so im not gonna worry about it anymore. thanks for the help though.
okay, but I mean memory is expensive so I would think you'd want all of it lol. Its worth a shot just checking it out IMO because if its not checked that means its running at the max ammount of memory in your system, so if it still says 3-4 GB w/e then that could be a sign one of your memory sticks is bad.