I'm running a Ryzen 5 5600X with a Radeon 6600 and 16GB of DDR4 Gskill 3600 RAM, but for some reason, my system only reads it at 2133. In Task Manager, it seems my browser and game launchers like Steam and EA are the main culprits, but even adding those up, I'm left wondering where the extra 4GB of RAM is being used. Could someone explain why this is happening?
5 Answers
What you're seeing is pretty normal. Windows will use RAM as needed but it also reserves some for caching and other OS functions. If you've got programs that use memory later on, Windows will just pull from the reserved RAM when necessary.
It sounds like you never enabled XMP/DOCP in your BIOS, which can limit your RAM's performance. When it's running at the default speed instead of its rated speed, it might not be functioning optimally.
Yeah, a friend of mine had the same issue! He didn’t realize he needed to enable it for over a year until I pointed it out. Pretty common oversight!
Weird, because when I had DOCP enabled, my PC wouldn’t boot up properly. Not sure what’s going on there.
Yeah, all modern OS's do this to speed up access times. The memory is available and will be freed if other apps need it. Trust me, unused RAM is wasting potential!
Think of it like a workshop with a worker who has covered half his space with tools. Your OS is just making sure memory is available when needed, even if it looks like it's not being used right now. It helps speed up processes when apps need to load.
Great analogy! It's true that sometimes it's more efficient to have a little extra memory at hand rather than trying to optimize everything down to the smallest amount.
It’s just the way Windows operates. It tends to reserve some RAM for tasks. Ultimately, even if you can’t see exactly where it’s allocated, it’s probably working behind the scenes.
But my RAM usage keeps rising even when I load a new game. That 40% doesn’t seem to change.