8gb system, only 5.9gb available

[bowiwod]

This notebook has 8gb installed, but only 5.9gb usable because the on board radeon vega 8 takes 2gb for itself. I find this a bit weird because this laptop has a dedicated GTX 1660 ti 6gb, so why is the radeon graphics chip still enabled? And taking up my precious ram? I would like all graphical things to go through the 1660, and to disable the radeon completely, because this would free up 2gb of ram. Is this possible? If not, how can I limit the RAM that this chip is eating?

[Photoray002]

Hello @bowiwod 

AMD systems in HPs have had this issue in the past and there was never a full solution to the memory allocation problem.

The HP 690 series desktops with Ryzen for example. I didn't know the newer laptops would be having this issue also.

As far as disabling the integrated graphics, does your Device Manager show the Ryzen graphics as well as the Nvidia card?

With past systems, even if the Ryzen was disabled from factory, the mem allocation was a problem. Only way to address it was with a bios update from HP, but even then, it still used up 1 GB of ram.

You can set the preferred graphics to be used in the NVIDIA Control panel, but you cannot disable the Ryzen integrated graphics.

[bowiwod]

Hello photoray, thanks for replying.

In the device manager both the gtx 1660 and the radeon vega are shown as display adapters.

I see that if I click on properties of the vega, then go to the Resources tab I can edit the memory address range that it uses. I could probably set this range to something smaller than 2gb but I assume editing this will have bad side effects and as such I'm not gonna touch that for now.

What bios update do you mean by the way? I have used the update utility from hp for my laptop from the hp website (support -> software & drivers), and the bios did update, but it still takes 2gb of ram. Could you perhaps send the link of the update that you're talking about?

I went into the bios set up of the laptop (f10 at startup, but the best bet is to reboot from within windows while holding shift down when pressing the reboot button, then go to troubleshooting, advanced, uefi settings) but I couldn't find any settings regarding the onboard video, not that I could edit at least.

[Photoray002]

I'm picking up a laptop this evening and will take a look at that device manager and see what happens.

The bios sets the memory allocation for the integrated graphics. When it occurred on one of the Desktop series, HP was able to create a bios update that dropped the allocated by half. But to get it like other systems, AMD would needed to have given HP the fix and that wasn't going to happen apparently.

Right now, there is no bios update for your system to alleviate the problem. If HP does create one, I will have NO way of knowing when its released. HP Policy. 😞

Sorry I dont have a better answer right now.

[bowiwod]

Were you able to do something manually? @Photoray002