Author Topic: Upgrading to 4GB RAM, what will I notice?  (Read 1471 times)

Offline Hamltnblue

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Re: Upgrading to 4GB RAM, what will I notice?
« Reply #30 on: October 08, 2008, 03:35:03 PM »
The maximum memory supproted for the 32 bit version of XP and Vista is 4 Gig. This includes Base Ram, Video ram, and any other on-board devices such as physx and sound.
If you have 4 gig of ram with a video card with 1 gig, you'll have about 2.5-2.8 gig of base ram actually used.  If your video card has 512meg they you'll max out at around 3 gig or alittle more.
As stated earlier it's best to go to 2 gig and upgrade that 5200 video card to something like a 9600GT which will give you a great bang for very few bucks.
About 100 bucks on Newegg.com

Offline drdeathx

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Re: Upgrading to 4GB RAM, what will I notice?
« Reply #31 on: October 08, 2008, 05:12:43 PM »
This is not accurate
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Offline Masherbrum

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Re: Upgrading to 4GB RAM, what will I notice?
« Reply #32 on: October 08, 2008, 07:01:21 PM »
I bought 2 GB x 2 Mushkin PC8500 DDR2 for my build and XP 32-bit recognizes 3.25GB of it.   The number is random per PC is what I have come to understand.   This computer is a hot rod and I haven't OC'd a thing.   

Buy 4GB, when you upgrade in the future, it's there. 
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Offline Anodizer

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Re: Upgrading to 4GB RAM, what will I notice?
« Reply #33 on: October 08, 2008, 09:16:17 PM »
While anodizer keeps his very biased opinion in the face of the facts and chooses to throw his insults around in this forum defies all logic.

The Ge7600GT outperforms the Ge7800GS, even. It handily outperforms the Ge6800 that Anodizer loves so much and glows about unendingly. He simply refuses to acknowledge these facts that EVERY benchmark test ever made has to show us.

As an example of how the 7600GT (and even the 7600GS in some cases) outperform the 6800GT, please see the following links:

http://xtreview.com/review140.htm

English is a bit broken, but scroll down to see the many performance comparison charts, across MANY games, and MANY settings. I think in all but 1 of them the Ge7600GT beats the 6800GT, and in all of them it beats the 7800S too.


http://www.penstarsys.com/reviews/video/evga/7600gtco/index.html

Here's a pretty in-depth review. Practical one, too. Says he thought it would be good to test against the 6600 but that it literally just blew that card into the dust, so he ran it against a 6800 GT thinking it would maybe be par, but it outpaced the 6800 GT.

Here, let's cut to the third page for the 6800/7600 comparison:
http://www.penstarsys.com/reviews/video/evga/7600gtco/7600gt_3.htm

Anodizer has tried insulting at me in-game as well, to the point I had to squelch him to continue playing. He seems to have some grudge.



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Offline Fulmar

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Re: Upgrading to 4GB RAM, what will I notice?
« Reply #34 on: October 08, 2008, 10:04:49 PM »
The number is random per PC is what I have come to understand.
The number is dependent on the amount of video RAM on your video card, not random.
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Offline drdeathx

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Re: Upgrading to 4GB RAM, what will I notice?
« Reply #35 on: October 09, 2008, 12:55:46 AM »
Im not sure it is dependent on video card. I run 1g (gtx280), had a  2g card(ati 4870 x 2)  and a 512(3870). My ram showed up exactly the same with ALL 3 CARDS. I am trying to find the reason and every explaination seems to be vague. I will try to find out but it seems the consencus on each forums is XP will max out at a bit over 3g. Macs max at 2g but there is some command or switch to get them to 3g. Will let ya all know but more than 3 is a waste. 32 bit is 3g 64 bit xp will recognize all. The performance difference between 2g and 3 g is minimal unless you do a lot of multi tasking.
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Offline drdeathx

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Re: Upgrading to 4GB RAM, what will I notice?
« Reply #36 on: October 09, 2008, 01:04:55 AM »
ok guys I found it. This seems to be a reasonable explaination


Friday, April 13, 2007 2:59 PM by Hilton Locke 
The 3GB-not-4GB RAM problem

Problem statement:
I just bought a system with 4GB of physical RAM in it. The BIOS posts 4GB, but Windows tells me that I have anywhere from 2.75 - 3.5GB of RAM. Where is the rest of my RAM?

Summary:
If you are running 32-bit Windows, you must live with it. You will not ever see all 4GB of RAM you've paid for.

If you are running 64-bit Windows, you may have to live with it. Depending on your motherboard's chipset, your system may support memory remapping. If so, you will be able to use all 4GB of RAM.

Detailed:
Due to an architectural decision made long ago, if you have 4GB of physical RAM installed, Windows is only able to report a portion of the physical 4GB of RAM (ranges from ~2.75GB to 3.5GB depending on the devices installed, motherboard's chipset & BIOS).

This behavior is due to "memory mapped IO reservations". Those reservations overlay the physical address space and mask out those physical addresses so that they cannot be used for working memory. This is independent of the OS running on the machine.

Significant chunks of address space below 4GB (the highest address accessible via 32-bit) get reserved for use by system hardware:

• BIOS – including ACPI and legacy video support

• PCI bus including bridges etc.

• PCI Express support will reserve at least 256MB, up to 768MB depending on graphics card installed memory

What this means is a typical system may see between ~256MB and 1GB of address space below 4GB reserved for hardware use that the OS cannot access. Intel chipset specs are pretty good at explaining what address ranges gets reserved by default and in some cases call out that 1.5GB is always reserved and thus inaccessible to Windows.

When looking at memory in systems (be it desktop or notebook) there are three questions to ask that will tell you the maximum amount of memory your O/S will be able to use:

1. What O/S Edition have you installed?

a. 32-bit Windows is limited to a maximum of 4GB and cannot see any pages above 4GB.

b. 64-bit Windows can use between 8GB and 128GB depending on SKU.

2. What address range can your processor actually access?

a. Typically that’ll be 40-bit addressing today for x64 (Intel EM64T/AMD64), but older processors may be limited to 36-bit or even 32-bit

3. Can your system’s chipset map memory above 4GB?

a. Mobile chipsets on sale today cannot (but that may change with time)

b. Newer workstations (which use chipsets developed for single or multi-proc servers) usually can.

Windows can remap memory from below 4GB to above 4GB and use it there, however, that relies on the three points above:

1. Can Windows access memory above 4GB?

a. 32-bit – NO

b. 64-bit – Maybe (due to chipset limitations)

2. Can your processor access memory above 4GB?

a. If it’s recent then it might, and if it’s either AMD64 or EM64T it’s almost certain

3. Does your chipset allow pages to be remapped above 4GB?

a. Probably not – and that’s what’s catching people who install 64-bit Vista to work around point 1 – they find they still cannot see above 4GB

In some cases, OEMs may be able to tweak their BIOS to reserve less memory for platform use, but we’re not talking a huge difference (ie, 100’s of MBs).

In the end a 32-bit OS and/or application can only, ever, handle 4GB of memory at a time, the AWE stuff just swaps chunks of memory in and out of that 4GB space, thus fooling the application and OS into using more space than it can “see”.

Physical Address Extension (PAE), extends the physical address space to 36-bits if your HW supports this. For most operations, the processor execution units will only see 32-bit addresses, the MMU will take care of the translation to 36bit addresses. No swapping here, only page translations (which are used regardless of PAE being on or not), this is a fundamental feature of any virtual memory operating system.

The OS and apps only see 32-bit addresses because the registers are limited to 32-bits (hence the “32-bit” architecture nomenclature). These are linear addresses which are extended to 36-bits in the translation to physical addresses, but they never show up in registers since there’s no room. It’s all internal until the address lines coming out of the chip are toggled. Thus my comment above about “if your H/W supports this (PAE)". I’m not going into how that works…

So, the OS can happily handle up to 64 GB of memory for 32-bit PAE-able systems.

Hope this helps explain the whole, ‘Why can’t I see 4 Gig of RAM in my system?” thing…

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Offline MrRiplEy[H]

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Re: Upgrading to 4GB RAM, what will I notice?
« Reply #37 on: October 09, 2008, 02:48:31 PM »
x) Do you really need to care about all this?

- No, not unless you actually run out of memory some day. Never happened to me with XP32 and 4gb physical ram.
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Offline Yossarian

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Re: Upgrading to 4GB RAM, what will I notice?
« Reply #38 on: October 09, 2008, 04:00:28 PM »
Spend the money replacing the FX5200, it will make more difference. There's loads of cheap 2nd hand stuff out there that will mince the 5200. The 5200 was always a low-end card, and several generations old now.


I completely agree with this, however my parents are far more interested in how well the computer will run than how well my games run  :D

I installed the RAM 2 days ago, and so far the computer is way faster.

When I tested out Aces High, when I turn down the settings for it from the Nvidia control panel, I can get a good 20-40 fps.  With antialiasing on, I can get around 8 fps.

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Offline drdeathx

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Re: Upgrading to 4GB RAM, what will I notice?
« Reply #39 on: October 10, 2008, 01:42:42 AM »
I would stop at 2g. The performance gain will be minimal unless you are multitasking like I suggested. Rip maybe some just do n ot know. 2 sounds better than 1 and 4 really sounds better thatn 2.
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Offline bustr

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Re: Upgrading to 4GB RAM, what will I notice?
« Reply #40 on: October 13, 2008, 12:46:39 AM »
Just finished a new XP Pro 32 system with 4G of RAM and XP sees 3.4G of the RAM from Task Manager. Aces High only sees 2G. My videio card is a GeForce 9800GT 512. Cpu Intel Core Duo 3.16Ghz E8500.
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Offline MrRiplEy[H]

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Re: Upgrading to 4GB RAM, what will I notice?
« Reply #41 on: October 13, 2008, 02:10:40 AM »
Just finished a new XP Pro 32 system with 4G of RAM and XP sees 3.4G of the RAM from Task Manager. Aces High only sees 2G. My videio card is a GeForce 9800GT 512. Cpu Intel Core Duo 3.16Ghz E8500.

This is perfectly as it should be and you should not worry about it. Your computer runs great unless you have problems elsewhere.
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Offline drdeathx

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Re: Upgrading to 4GB RAM, what will I notice?
« Reply #42 on: October 13, 2008, 02:33:10 AM »
You should be good to go Bustr!!!!! Very stout system!
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Offline macerxgp

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Re: Upgrading to 4GB RAM, what will I notice?
« Reply #43 on: October 16, 2008, 08:14:13 PM »
I feel better now knowing my aging FX5500 isn't the oldest card in service. :rofl

But I REALLY need to upgrade. Are there any better cards out under $30? I'm thinking a midrange 6XXX.

And NO, going above ~$35 is NOT an option.
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Offline Fulmar

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Re: Upgrading to 4GB RAM, what will I notice?
« Reply #44 on: October 16, 2008, 09:03:29 PM »
I feel better now knowing my aging FX5500 isn't the oldest card in service. :rofl

But I REALLY need to upgrade. Are there any better cards out under $30? I'm thinking a midrange 6XXX.

And NO, going above ~$35 is NOT an option.
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