"Hardware reserved" Memory?

[Nick]

Hi, As many of you may know, I recently bought a RAM upgrade for my laptop. I went from 4gb to 8gb, and it’s Crucial Ballistix DDR3L 1600MHz laptop RAM. In the task manager, it reports that 1.1gb of that 8gb of RAM is hardware reserved, but on my mom’s laptop with 6gb, only 204mb is hardware reserved. They’re both running Windows 10 Home x64, but her hardware is different and her computer is slightly older. I’m thinking maybe it’s the components in my computer that are stealing my RAM, but I don’t know, so what I’d like to know is what’s using up 1.1gb of my RAM, and how can I reduce that?
My laptop:
[URL unfurl="true"]https://novabench.com/image/1266988.png[/URL]
Mom’s laptop:
[URL unfurl="true"]https://novabench.com/image/871590.png[/URL]

[veeg]

Hello Nick

Hopefully some of our members will chime in soon.

@Bill1 @DOUGIE

[jmarket]

Hey Nick,

When RAM says Harware Reserved, it’s reserved for onboard graphics.

[Nick]

Ok so I went into DxDiag and looked to see if the video memory increased and it did, but I looked at the Novabench score from before and after installing the new RAm and if anything, the graphics score went down…
Before
After

[Bill1]

Nick, as jmarket said, you’re sharing RAM with the video card, and IMO that’s not the best situation. And you shouldn’t expect a big improvement in performance.

[Nick]

Yes, I understand, but why did it decide to increase when I put more RAM in, and why can’t I decrease it?

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G920A using Tapatalk

[Bill1]

Another way to ask your question is “why didn’t the GPU take more, or all of the additional memory?” And you may have your answer.

[Nick]

Socratic method much? I don’t know, I’m more or less of a computer noob.

[Bill1]

I didn’t mean to be obscure. GPUs and motherboards are designed with an upper limit for the amount of memory that’s acceptable. A M/B designed to accept 16gigs, just won’t deal with 32gigs. GPUs are about the same. As to why you cannot reduce the GPU memory shared, I suspect, but not know, that once you have hit the upper limit for the card it’s going to keep it. It isn’t as if it takes what it needs only for the particular task at hand.

[Malnutrition]

. I went from 4gb to 8gb

You should be fine with 8 gigs. Is your machine performing slowly? If so I’d be more than happy to help you speed it up a bit.

If you would like a tune up on the machine then run the program below and post the logs for me.

Autologger Scan.

[ul]
[li]Disable your Antivirus & Anti spyware applications!![/li][li]Download Autologger to your desktop.[/li][li]Unzip it there. – If you are unsure how to unzip a program, then use ---- http://www.7-zip.org/ ----[/li][li]Right click Autologger and run as admin. (Xp user double click)[/li][li]AVZ4 will open and scan your machine, allow this to complete.[/li][li]Upload Collectionlog.zip to your next reply.[/li][li]https://i.imgur.com/KA81Q57.png[/li][/ul]

[Nick]

I downloaded it and launched it but it told be the system date was wrong and closed…