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Area 51 m7700 Maximum Memory

post #1 of 4
5/18/10 at 2:04pm
Thread Starter 
Hi,

I (still) have an Area 51 M7700 (Intel) that I hope to replace soon, but it is going to have to soldier on for another few months. For some of the programming work I do, I have to run the laptop with a 64-bit operating system and have recently upgraded to Windows 7 which is running great but I am finding the 2GB RAM the system has to be a bit marginal.

I know the system will physically take 4GB but I seem to remember reading back when the 7700s were new that some people found that the BIOS will only "see" 3GB. I do also remember some people claiming to have sucessfully installed 4GB.

So, my question is, has anybody had any success with installing 4GB in a 7700 or am I better off just going to 3GB (which I'm sure will still provide an improvement)?
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post #2 of 4
5/18/10 at 3:03pm
Stock max is 3GB on this comp. If only for a few more months then it is what I would should for and leave things in working condition

cheers ...
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post #3 of 4
5/24/10 at 4:41pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by PaulH2 View Post
Hi,

I (still) have an Area 51 M7700 (Intel) that I hope to replace soon, but it is going to have to soldier on for another few months. For some of the programming work I do, I have to run the laptop with a 64-bit operating system and have recently upgraded to Windows 7 which is running great but I am finding the 2GB RAM the system has to be a bit marginal.

I know the system will physically take 4GB but I seem to remember reading back when the 7700s were new that some people found that the BIOS will only "see" 3GB. I do also remember some people claiming to have sucessfully installed 4GB.

So, my question is, has anybody had any success with installing 4GB in a 7700 or am I better off just going to 3GB (which I'm sure will still provide an improvement)?
Having spent the better part of the last two months nose deep in the spec sheet for the northbridge used in this mobo, I can, definitively state that you will be able to get 3.17GB working. That is it. If you install 4gb, that's all you'll get. The reason:

The chipset only has enough address lines to address 4gb of ram. The upper 800ish MB is reserved for device I/O ranges (and some shadowing). It might be possible to re-write the bios initialization of the NB in such a manner that it re-maps the Device ranges over the 4GB line, but it's not indicated in the NB spec sheet how to do that (which likely means it's not possible).
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post #4 of 4
7/10/10 at 8:21am
Great, another way that Alienware screwed us with the 7700. Next I'm going to find out that the entire system has been classified as a carcinogen and cut ten years off my life just by being in proximity to it.
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