shed some light on this please

my new rig is up and running at last :rockon: but there are just some questions that i need help with i have Corsair 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 1600 in stalled in the system but when i go to run windows index it shows that there are 4Gb install and only 2.99GB is usable:surprised: i used CPU-Z which shows that there are 6GB installed so what gives

the other question is, i have i7 950 which from the info is clocked at 3.6GHz but again in win index it shows that it is running at 3.7GHz i have no tried any overclocked i just want to know why this as happened.

thanks for your help

You are running a Windows 7 32 bit which means that the total system RAM which is addressable is 4GB. Your GTX560TI has a total of 1GB of video RAM meaning the OS sees 3GB of system RAM.

As cat said, I'm amazed that you've got as much as 2.99gb, I would of expected around 2.75gb when running a 1gb graphics card (all other caches and such also eat into total addressable memory)

Does HDD cache also reduce the total accessible system RAM?

Actually its not really a "cache" is a part of memory address space for DMA (Direct Memory Access), rather than PIO (Programmed IO), many cards work via having a section of memory address space for the processor to talk to the card, the largest section is that of the graphics card. I am also surprised as well your available memory is not lower.

Thanks Oolon, for making my ramble a bit clearer.
I'm at work, so didn't have time to go into more/clearer detail.

So many PEBCAK's to deal with.