HP 17-ca1211ng No BIOS setting for shared video-RAM 2 GB RAM permanently blocked / wasted

[Steffen_Gans]

Neither do I. When I click on the inbox I see a message "Beware of fake HP Support". Kind of ironic - don't you think 😉

@Praveen196: Like Rufus5 said, telephone support redirects me to this forum. This is not an issue a call center agent could resolve. A BIOS update is the only possible solution because this setting can not be changed by the user. Not even with guidance via telephone.

[Riddle_Decipher]

@Steffen_Gans I agree with that, however, the support team should be ale to guide you the team that should be able to help you out, that said, if you are having trouble navigating through the steps provided by the other tech, it's most likely because the device is out of warranty, if yes? please send me a private message with the region you are contacting us from, 

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[Steffen_Gans]

The Laptop is brand new, I bought it about a week ago and I am thinking about returning the device to the store. I as a customer made the effort to post a bug report here but I do not have the feeling that the issue is taken seriously. Instead I am supposed to sink even more time into a telephone-call-center.

I understand you guys  are working hard answering lots of questions here on the support-forum. But in this case it is not a question that could be solved by this forum or by a a call-center agent, but instead a bug-report that needs to reach the developers. If this forum is not the right place for this kind of technical problems, please let me know what is the appropriate way of contact for bug-reports concerning current HP-laptops.

Best regards.

[asmita6658]

Hi @Steffen_Gans

Please look for a private message from me requesting additional information. Keep in mind not to publicly post personal information (serial numbers and case details).

If you are unfamiliar with how the Community's private message capability works, you can learn about that here.

Thank you for visiting the HP Support Community.

[Steffen_Gans]

I've read reports that other models are affected, too. For example HP 17-ca1430ng, HP 17-ca1120ng, HP 14-dk0104ng. Possibly all HP Notebooks with Ryzen and 8 GB RAM?

[Rufus5]

@Steffen_Gans
I'd say not only Ryzen but all recent AMD CPUs with integrated graphics. Mine is Athlon 300U(very similar to Ryzen 3 3200U) + Vega 3. 
Btw, did you try it with only 4Gb memory installed? On my end the reserved mem is just 512Mb when there is only 4Gb installed, which seems to be acceptable even if we extrapolate same logic on 8Gb case -- just 1Gb reserved. But still, having 2Gb is just overkill, I haven't seen the GPU mem consumption higher than ~300Mb on Linux with bunch of GPU-heavy apps launched. 

Also, I've seen replies that BIOS can decrease GPU size adaptively, but it seems it's not the case for me: with swap/pagefile enabled it starts to swap when close to 5.9, and with swap disabled the process is klled by OS. 

[Steffen_Gans]

Thanks for you reply! I don't want to open any screws on the brand new laptop as long as I have not decided yet if I will keep it or return it. But I would assume that it would behave similarly to yours (4GB RAM -> 512MB VRAM). But reducing RAM to 4 GB wouldn't really make things better 😉

[Rufus5]

Yeah, gotcha. Mine comes with just 4 gigs installed, so I upgraded it to 8. I'm pretty happy with other specs and the fact that it runs Linux just fine, but this issue with 2Gb reserved with no reason makes me sad. 
I think I'll try to push the issue forward and PM to other guys who asked similar questions here, as it seems just two of us isn't enough for HP to support their products. 🙂 

[Rufus5]

I've just sent a message to AMD support, hopefully they'll be able to clarify that. 

[Steffen_Gans]

In the german-speaking HP-support-forum I got a reply that the issue would be "forwarded internally" but he wouldn't make any promises. https://h30492.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Hardware/Von-8-GB-RAM-stehen-nur-5-9-GB-zur-Verfügung-wegen/m...