TECH is there a way of testing RAM usage?

[bender]

just finish a new i7 2600K build with 8 GBs of RAM. just starting to OC it and running prime 95. during the test, task manager is showing a total of 8172 MB but memory usage is only at 3.12 GBs and 4972 MB available. is there a way of testing to see if I have the BIOS set up properly and not wasting 4 GBs of RAM?

 

[deusexaethera]

Half of the RAM that Prime95 is using has been paged to the pagefile because it's not actively being used. Windows controls this; that's its job.

 

[skinjob]

If windows tells you that your system has 8GB, then your hardware is setup properly. Are you running a custom prime95 test where you specify how much ram to use? The standard test presets don't use up a lot of ram.

 

[Graham]

64-bit os, right?

 

[Murq]

ram is so fast it's untestable.

 

[Graham]

If windows tells you that your system has 8GB, then your hardware is setup properly. Are you running a custom prime95 test where you specify how much ram to use? The standard test presets don't use up a lot of ram.

I guess that makes sense. It's not a ram test per se, but a stability test.

 

[crontab]

there are other benchmark tests out there that can use up all of the ram. i don't remember any off the top of my head, but you should be able to find them on other forum posts with prime96, et al.

 

[5Gen_Prelude]

memtest will stress test it if that's what you want to do.