New PC time

[der_jackal]

Originally Posted by Paco

Other than a few server OS's, 32-bit operating systems have no way of using more than 2gigs. It is an architectural limit that prevents it from reading memory addresses above a certain range. There are a few tricks you can do to have 3gigs show up in your system properties (PAE, /3G, etc.), but it still won't actually use more than 2gigs.

Slightly incorrect. You're right that only x86 Server Editions can use above a certain limit, but that limit is 4GB.

PAE does nothing on Windows consumer editions anymore. It doesn't actually do anything to aid in "showing" more than 2GB either, the amount of RAM the OS is actually able to address is purely based on the requirements of the system devices.

Say you put in 4GB of RAM on your x86 install, and you've got 2x512MB nVidia cards on board not running in SLI, you lose 1GB of available addresses right there. After the rest of the system's devices finish requesting their resources, you'll probably see 2.75 - 2.5GB leftover for Windows to use.

If you take out one out or enable SLI mode, you'll see you pretty much gain 512MB back in the amount of RAM the OS can use.


Probably the best walk through of showing out this all works on 32bit systems;
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1035670

[gti138]

Everything I need is in - I'm changing from 640's to 500GB HDD's as I'm impatient... Have changed to a Gigabyte HD4850 GPU as that seems to be the way to go

Got my copy of Vista Ultimate x64 so will give that a run to see what it's like.