I suspect it may be bios level allocation of system ram to an igpu? I think that could affect how the system reports ram??

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think all the replies are misunderstanding you as saying 'who has so much RAM', when you're actually referring to 30 being a bizarre total number of GB of RAM to have.

I can't even think of a combo of (certainly-mismatched) sticks of RAM that'd get you to 30 even. 8-8-8-6?

RAM used to grow on trees next to the money bushes. We used to grab a few bucks and smoke under the shade before picking a few rams on our way back home.

30gb RAM, 2.3TB hard drive, 7-core Intel Q-447, and an NVIDIA BTX 8675309 graphics card.

Usually just from trying to max out what they have without replacing sticks. I had 80gb for a while when I added 2 32GB sticks to my 8GBx2 setup. I eventually removed the two 8GB sticks due to stability issues.

Many laptop-users I knkw, which fell for the “more is better”-strategy. A friend has 40 GB of RAM, because his laptop came with 16 GB preinstalled, and he added 24 GB more. Yes.

The minimum you can get per stick is 16GB for DDR5. You usually want 2 sticks for dual-channel memory