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Lee 2010-04-01 05:31
I've got an old Gigabyte 8IG1000MK motherboard with a GeForce 7600GS in the AGP slot, currently running dual monitors. I decided this week to add a third monitor by attempting to install a standard PCI graphics card, but am having problems right off the bat. I have 4GB of DDR RAM in the board, though it only registers as 3.67 due to the age of the board and CPU. However, when I plug in the PCI graphics card, it hangs on post and then registers only 2.8gb RAM. I've tried moving it to other PCI slots, removing other devices, etc. There also seems to be no setting in my bios that I can find to change my PCI/AGP settings, so when the PCI card is plugged in, it completely disables the AGP card. Any thoughts?
Gigabyte 8IG1000MK
Pentium 4 2.8ghz
PNY AGP 8x GeForce 7600GS
PNY PCI GeForce 8400GS
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ecarlson 2010-04-01 14:15
Try setting the the other card as primary in the BIOS (whichever one is not currently set as primary -- or if it is set to Auto, try PCI then try AGP).
If that doesn't work, you might also have to adjust some memory mapping related settings in the BIOS, but I don't know what specific settings would need to be changed.
Though, one of the first things I do is make sure the latest BIOS update is installed. I've seen people spend days trying to get something working until they finally took my advice and updated the BIOS, which solved the problem, and only took a couple minutes to do.
- Eric, www.InvisibleRobot.com
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Lee 2010-04-01 17:52
Thanks for the suggestion. I tried it both ways, and I've managed to get both cards to run in windows without too much difficulty. I currently have it set to AGP as priority, and only the monitors on the AGP card show during boot, but the PCI card and its monitor kick in once Windows is up and running.
I'm still having a RAM problem, though. It doesn't matter how I have it set up; as long as the PCI card is plugged in, the Computer only seems to register 2.75GB total RAM, when I actually have 3.5 usable. Checked all my bios settings and made sure it's up to date. Unless I'm just missing something obvious, I have no clue how to get it to read correctly.
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ecarlson 2010-04-02 11:43
How much RAM do your video cards have? The video card memory could be impinging on your available system RAM since all the memory is trying to fit in the same 4.Gig address space.
- Eric, www.InvisibleRobot.com
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Robert Tang-wai 2010-04-10 08:15
I have 3 video cards in my setup and I have only 2.75GB available in Windows XP because the third one (ATI 2400pro) uses Hypermemory which eats a fair chunk of system RAM. The easiest way to get around it is to use a 64-bit OS, which maps the 500MB-1GB or so of BIOS mapped memory into a higher address space and leaves all the physical RAM alone. In Windows 7 64-bit, I have 3.85GB.
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ecarlson 2010-04-10 15:40
I also recommend using Windows 7 64-bit to access all 4.Gigs of memory (or more if you have it).
I also try to avoid buying video cards that use system memory as their own, like ATI HyperMemory and NVidia TurboCache cards do.
My Windows 7 64-bit systems seems to be seeing essentially all 4.Gig I have installed. In resource Monitor, on the Memory tab, it shows only 5.MB reserved for hardware of the installed 4096.MB, leaving 4091.MB available for the OS/software. The complete details of my system build are on my web site.
- Eric www.InvisibleRobot.com
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Kevin Connolly 2010-05-11 04:15
Windows 32-bit can only address 4GB of address space for all devices; just that most of it ends up coming from RAM. This 4GB includes video memory and other hardware devices.
KConnolly.NET
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