I've recently upgraded my video card from a vanilla 6800 to an 8800GT 512mb, as well as going from 2GB of RAM to 3GB of RAM.
The BIOS recognized a new ram amount, and sees it as 3GB.
I am well aware of the 4GB limit on addressable memory, however I wouldn't expect an older system to reserve so much (1.75GB reserved or used elsewhere).
This is my hardware:
CPU Type Intel Pentium 4 630, 3000 MHz
Motherboard Name Dell Dimension 8400
Motherboard Chipset Intel Alderwood i925XE
System Memory 2304 MB (DDR2-533 DDR2 SDRAM) (BIOS reports the full 3GB)
BIOS Type Phoenix (01/10/05)
Video Adapter NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT (512 MB)
Two IDE optical drives, 1 150GB sata drive, 1 PCI sound card, using on board network card and that's it.
I tried updating my BIOS and I disabled onboard sound, but no changes.
I do not have an option to disable the onboard video, at all, unless I'm missing something.
My DIMM setup is:
I have a 512 stick in DIMM 1 and 2, and a 1 gig stick in 3 and 4.
And I did confirm that the board supports up to 4GB of memory.
This is the manual for my system:
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/s ... /index.htm
Is there anything else I can try? Any way to see exactly what addressable memory is being used and by what? To change those settings? Any way to force a disable of onboard video if the BIOS does not have the option?