I am in the process of building a new computer based on an Intel i7 870, an MSI  P55-GD80  1156 motherboard, and four two-gig sticks 
of Corsair memory.

When I booted the computer into the BIOS, it says on the first page at the top that I have 4GB of memory, even though I should have 
8GB.  In the bios, it "sees" all four sticks of memory.  It seems to read the memory properly per the SPD.

Then, I loaded  Windows 7 64-bit software and looked into the System settings and it said that I had 8GB of memory, but it also said 
that I had "4GB reserved" by the motherboard (or bios or something).  It was only using 4GB.

I have never used more than 4GB of memory before, sticking with the 32 bit operating systems, so I don't know if this "reserved" 
thing is typical or not.

At any rate, I don't know how to unreserve it.  There doesn't seem to be any setting for the memory.  I saw on a YouTube video on 
this mb that their overclocking button did not work well with more than 4GB of memory.  (And TurboBoost is also activated.)  But, I 
have not tried to overclock it yet.

If anyone has any idea of what is going on here, I would appreciate your input.  I know that this is pretty new stuff, so, perhaps, 
nobody on the list has had any experience with this hardware.

(The NewEgg rating for this mb was 100% five stars, BUT they all were using only 4GB of memory!  I chose the 8GB because I saw a 
YouTube video of a review that used 8GB of this same type of memory, so I assumed that it would work.)

I won't bother to continue with the 64 bit versions of W7 if I can't get to use more than 4GB of memory - I'll just load the 32 bit 
version instead.

Thanks,

Dean Kukral 

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