RAM not adding up to 4 Gb??

Hey guys,

jus a quick question: how come in by activity monitor it tells me i have 3.88 gb of RAM, screenshots of other people it always say 4.00!!

why does it say this?

thanks

That should be the amount being used by your video card at 128MB.

hmmm, shouldnt the intel HD graphics use 288mb?? thats what is says unter system profiler. oh and if the intel HD graphics is not being used, should the RAM go up to 4gb?

Don't have a clue which Mac you have.

But no, I am not aware of any video card that uses 288mb.
They would typically be:
8
16
32
64
128
256
512
1 GB

As bobtomay said it is the allocation for your video card (built in ) unless you have a pro
with a discrete video and memory it will not give you 4gb on 4gb's of memory on the spec sheet you will notice the word shared.

i have the 15" macbook pro, i7 processor, intel HD graphics, nVidia GeForce GT 330M with 512mb. Yeh when i purchased it it said the intel HD graphics has 256mb of SHARED memory, however under system profiler it says 288mb, (see attached screenshot) i found this pretty weird. I did some further research, like you said, the reason to why it dosnt say 4.00Gb is because it of the graphics card, id expect it so however then say 3.72gb and not 3.88gb as that would mean 120mb is shared with the video card. i dont get it

The amount of available RAM to your system will vary based on the current need of the video graphics at a given point in time.

I know Apple now uses base 10 instead of base 2 for hard drives so I wonder if they use it for memory too. So 128MB (base 2) equals 134MB (base 10). I don't know this just throwing it out there.

Good one, hadn't even thought of that and it could be coming into play here. Have not really delved into how much of the other functions (like this) have changed over or if SL is using some mix of base 2 and base 10 for different reports.

Just did a check and the online calculator I used does show 256 to be 288 in base 10. So that answers that one.
As far as the RAM, still think that will vary depending on how much of the 256 is being used by the graphics at any time.

Pretty sure the intel chipset uses 144MB of RAM and it will dynamically expand as needed.