OK with 3Gb - KO with 4Gb in Lenovo X61 Intel GMA X3100

Hi all,

The same behaviour happens under XP and Linux. When I run the system with 3Gb SL runs fine, however when I upgrade it to 4Gb just after loging in SL runs fine but in a few seconds moving around the client stalls and performance drops to 1 or 2 FPs. The 2Gb SODIM modules are fine because when I run the system with just 2Gb of ram (any of them alone) SL runs at stable and reasonable performance. The performance issue (drop to 2FPs) happens only when the memory is toped to the system max: 4Gb.

This happens in a Lenovo X61 laptop with the 965 chipset (X3100 integrated GMA) and BIOS recently updated to 2.07. The system passed the bios memory test satisfactorily when upgraded to 4Gb. What a mistery, Glxgears (Linux) runs better with 4Gb of Ram but SL completly stalls.

Is anyone suffering the same 3Gb limitation?

cheers,


Ruben

When you put 4 gig of ram into a machine with a 32bit OS the video card memory and all IO ports of all hardware devices sit right on top of the active ram.

The memory and IO controllers are SUPPOSED to parcel out main ram vs video ram/ports as needed but it sounds like you got some hardware problem where the MB is NOT doing it right.

With only 3 gig nothing is sitting on top of the main ram. This /might/ be fixable with a BIOS update. Or you can try a 64bit OS or you may just not be able to use 4 gig in that machine ever

I've got 4 gig in my machine and only about 3.4 gig "free" because of the video memory hole but it works fine.

bios only does a role call of memory, just becuase it passed bios doesnt mean there could be something wrong

http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp

Hello, thanks for the comments,

The Windows XP Professional I am using is the 32bit, however the Linux partition is a Fedora 8 64bit. The issue is exactly the same. Something wrong happens to the graphic performance after a while moving around when total Ram is 4Gb (even with the latest drivers).

regards,

Ruben

After a driver update the SL client performs well under windows, but under Fedora 8 64bits the performance still drops to 2fps when the system has 4Gb of RAM... Ill pass this to the Linux forum...

Ruben