P4C800-E Deluxe, P4C800 Deluxe, 4X1GB DDR400

I gifted two boards to nephews, a P4C800 Deluxe, the other an -E
Deluxe. I have 8 sticks of OCZ Platinum that I pulled from a spare CAD
box and intend to gift it to the new owners of the Asus boards.
I saw a post by Mr Justin David regarding the P4C800-E and 4X1GB
sticks. He mentioned that with BIOS v1019 POST reported <3.5GB and
after flashing to the latest none-beta (would be v1023) POST reported
approx 3.9GB.
AsusTek have scant BIOS "fixed/support" data on their English
language site, I am curious as to the changes from v1019 on the -E
Deluxe to v1023?
Anyone with experience of utilizing 4GB of RAM on these boards
please share your trials or delights.
Both boxes are for photography work, one will also see some video
duties.
I am somewhat nostalgic about the -E Deluxe board, two WD 10K drives
in RAID 0 on the ICH5R made the thing fly. For a desktop machine they
had to be the best Skt 478 based board, along with the Abit IC7 Max3.
The straight P4C800 deluxe with the 3com LAN ran for 22 months with
4 hours total power off to clean the fans, vac out the case and reboot
after software maintenance . Asus, excellent product, crap support.

 

Hi

What I understand it is not allways a motherboard problem, if you see
less than all your ram. There is a Microsoft page somewhere which tell
that XP needs some ram space. If you have a full machine. I could not
find it now, but perhaps an earlier post on this newsgroup helps.

"Asus, excellent product, crap support." I agree.

Regards
LM

 

After the bios update, I was about 3.85. And after I switched
graphics boards, I went back down to 3.535 gigs. Not sure why that
happened; the new graphics board is 256 megs and the one removed
64... I'm assuming that might have something to do with the it. I'm
using W2K Pro...

 

Yes. AGP use the RAM.

 

Thank you for your input gentleman. The new owner of the P4C800-E
reported the same issue as Mr Justin David mentioned. Nephew 1 has
loaded the 1023 BIOS and the POST now reports shy of 4GB.
"Physical address extension mode" in windows OS is not something
I will study with any fervour so I will pass the homework on to nephew
1 to see if there is any merit in enabling PAE.
Suffice to say that both young men have 4 sticks each of what is
already "legacy" memory.
The lazier and younger owner of the P4C800 (3com LAN) is probably too
busy polishing the shiny covers on the OCZ sticks to have bothered to
check the POST.
I add to my summary of Asus, dodgy website with intermittant
download service! Still a good product though.