I bought my computer knowing that it's memmory is 64 meg. what is shown under the system properties that it has only 60 meg. I was told that this system has 64 meg of syncDRAM shared memmory architecture with 4 meg reserved for video memmory but what i don't understand is that when i exit windows and run the mem.exe in the MS-DOS it still shows 60 meg. Does someone know the explanation of this and how can you know the total system memmory.

the total memory will be 64mg but 4mg will be held back for the ramm's own drivers

This thread is 8 years old! :eek: I doubt this is a problem anymore!

The answer is onboard video, by the way. 4MB is used for onboard video.

And the onboard video memory is shared all the time...not just in Windows.

That is still true today, with onboard video...except on one Gigabyte motherboard with the 780G chipset...it has a dedicated slot for a stick of DDR3 RAM for the onboard video.

That is still true today, with onboard video...except on one Gigabyte motherboard with the 780G chipset...it has a dedicated slot for a stick of DDR3 RAM for the onboard video.A decade ago, there was a strange slot supported in the i440 and i810/i815 series of chipsets. It was called an AIMM (http://www.interfacebus.com/AGP_Inline_Memory_Module.html) slot - AGP Inline Memory Module. It was very strange. I remember owning a Compaq long ago with such a slot.

There have been other such interesting slots throughout the ages. It really is true that original ideas are declining. ;)

The funny thing is, the specs for the 780G chipset have that added slot from the word go...the whole thing was designed to basically put a full HD 3200 on board and with adding a single card allow Crossfire...the specs even called for two 16s to be included, so you could, theoretically tri-Crossfire with just two cards. I'm looking at that board for HTPC use, after someone posted it in an HTPC thread...I spent hours reading up on it. It is looking like a sweet multimedia/htpc board.

Cool thing about the latest NVidia chipsets with onboard video: if you install a dedicated NVidia vid card (limited series right now), you have the option of switching over to the onboard video when you don't need it (ie, when you're just surfing the web). Just a few clicks in the NVidia Control Panel and voila! Instant turn-off for the vid card! :cool:

It's all pretty cool stuff, I must admit. Nice to see the lowly onboard video finally achieve some greatness after all these years.