16gig of ram but computer also says (8gig usable) anyone know what this means???

This page may help: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/978610 Follow the suggestions given there to see what is actually happening to your RAM. 1) You bought the computer for 3D animation, therefore it is likely that you chose a good video card. If that card has its own RAM, that will be mapped first and will deduct from the maximum memory that is supported. If it shares some of the memory you have installed, then that is reserved and will be deducted from the total RAM. 2) Possibly (but not very likely if you bought the computer new and the RAM was installed by the shop) some of your RAM is incompatible. 3) What version of Windows are you running? Is the BIOS capable of remapping the memory (and are the BIOS settings correct)? Finally, 8Gb of RAM should be enough for most purposes. It won't make that much difference to the speed if you have 16Gb unless the program you are running is very memory hungry or the animations are huge and complex with hundreds of thousands of nodes per object.

s yours an integrated motherboard? The lost' RAM is most probably used by the integrated graphic chip. Your pc would probably go slightly faster, but you may not notice it. But then your graphics chip needs some RAM to run.