Half of my RAM is hardware reserved

LuCal said:

NTN, thanks for your help. I'm trying things as fast as I can so the thread seems busy. I always put things back the way I found them right away so that I don't create a second problem. I hope that you will continue to make suggestions.

Megahertz, below is the BIOS SATA screen:
Attachment 384799

You have drives connected to the sata ports.

Do NOT disable sata ports........

Megahertz said:

If you don't have any SATA drives why don't you disable the SATA ports?

the screenshot you are saying no sata drives is a pic from the manual showing where integrated graphics would be, not the posters actual settings.

NTN, I'll give it a try. Someone else had posted that he cleaned each of the RAM modules with an eraser to remove oxidation, and it did the trick.

Clean the RAM carefully with a fiber cloth maybe, but not any chemical...........not so very funny in fact.

Welcome tomdsr! I appreciate your input and did not do anything regarding the SATA drives.

I did rub the RAM modules with a white gentle eraser and cleaned them with an air compressor. Then I tried putting just one 16GB ram module in the different slots. I noticed that the computer only beeped at startup when the RAM was in slots 4 and 2. Interestingly, one of the RAM (A) had 69.9 Mb hardware reserved in slot 2 while the other (B) reserved 48.8 Mb in slot 2. In slot 4, RAM (A) had 48.8 Mb hardware reserved while RAM (B) had 69.9 Mb hardware reserved. I then tried to put the RAM modules in different order in slots 1 and 2 as stated in the module, but both ways showed 16.1 GB reserved for hardware.

Someone wrote on Tom's Hardware site that they had the same issue. He resolved it by trying a single RAM at a time and then putting one module in slot 4 and another in slot 2. This puts them next to each other and is not what the manual suggests, but when I tried it, the Task Manager showed only 69.9 Mb reserved for hardware. I'm going to try it like this and hope it doesn't lead to other issues.

Thanks to all of you for your help!

In the BIOS if you enable the X.M.P setting the computer should automatically configure the correct RAM speeds.

This was posted earlier but they left out the diagram that showed how the RAM slots are numbered.

Thanks Mr. Ed, I tried changing the XMP setting from Disable to Profile 1 (the only other option). The computer struggled to start Windows and had critical errors, so I just changed it back to Disable.

LuCal said:

Thanks Mr. Ed, I tried changing the XMP setting from Disable to Profile 1 (the only other option). The computer struggled to start Windows and had critical errors, so I just changed it back to Disable.

The XMP profiles should work if you are using RAM that is fully compatible with your motherboard. If the XMP profiles don't work then settings the timings manually might work. The problem is finding the right timing settings.

You are lucky you didn't have to contend with a first generation Ryzen motherboard like I had to. I have a ASUS Prime X370-Pro motherboard that I bought with an AMD Ryzen 7 1700X in April 2017. When I bought the motherboard there was no guidance so I just bought Corsair Vengeance 16GB (2x8GB) 2666MHz. When I first installed Windows 10 it would not boot unless the RAM was set at 2133MHz. After 6 months of BIOS updates I was finally able to run it at the rated DOCP 2666MHZ.

Last year I replaced the CPU with a Ryzen 7 3700X. I then wanted to upgrade the RAM to 32GB of DDR4-3200. I did a lot of searching because back in 2017 a lot of people had a hard time with DDR4-3200 RAM with first generation Ryzen motherboards. The best some could do was set it to 2933MHz. I had read the G.Skill Flare X RAM was supposed to work well with Ryzen so I bought the following:

Flare X F4-3200C16D-32GFX
32GB (2x16GB)
DDR4-3200 CL16-18-18-38 1.35V

It worked fine at the rated speeds in my old Ryzen computer as you can see in my BIOS screenshot:
Note D.O.C.P is the same as X.M.P.

I bought this custom gaming computer from the guy who built it. It never occurred to me that the RAM might not be fully compatible with the motherboard. I'm going to leave it as is since Task Manager indicates both RAM modules are available and see how it goes going forward. Thank you for the information you provided. You were all very helpful.