Only Sees 7.9gb of ram

[SCprez]

Hello everyone. this is my first time posting. i have been searching for an answer to this for weeks now. i have verson 11.3-U4.1. but have been having this issue with all the versions. the following are my specs. and i used what i had left over

Motherboard: 970A-G46 with latest bios
RAM: 24gbs - all ram shows in the bios when booting
Processor: FX-8350
Graphics card: just had to switch mine went bad today. zotac GT730 PCIE2.0x1 1gb DDR3 card
Microsoft wireless keyboard mouse (i know doesnt matter but too much info is better then no enough)
Hard drives 4x 2tb western digital drives (ZFS pool)
Boot drive 240gb western digital (i believe)

No matter what ram i put in there or what configuration it will only show 7.9gb

i have tried 4x 4 gb sticks of ddr3 all matching

i now have 2 8gb sticks of one company and 2 4gb sticks of another. bios recognizes all the ram every time i boot but freenas will only show 7.9gb

i have deleted all tunables and turned off autotune then rebooted same result

i have tried putting auto tune back on and same result

i know its running a 64bit kernel because its showing 7.9gb if it wasn't then it would only show 4gb

and ideas or setting i missed? do you guys need any more info on setup or anything please let me know. its driving me nuts

Thank you in advance

 

[SCprez]

Also my orignal setup was a different board and processor

MSI board with a Phenom II x4 processor
8gb of ram
built in graphics
same drives

sorry forgot to include that, could that be the issue or the root cause of the problem?