Vex Star

Haven’t built my new computer yet, going to use Vista Business 32 bit. It’s the only version I could get from the Academic Alliance. I know I only get a max of 4gb, or is it it 3.1gb? Or what is it really?

The video card memory counts against the 4gb, right? So if I have a 512mb video card, I should install 3.5 gb of ram? Or how about getting a 1gb 8800gt, with 3gb ram installed? Would that be better? If I was to do that, would the 32 bit OS see all 3gb?

And if I do 3gb of ram installed, should i do 2 x 1gb, 2 x 512mb or 3 x 1gb?

ibnogymforhome
window’s 32-bit memory limit is 3GB.

If you plan to get a mobo with an onboard video card, it will take or share some of that ram. it’s recommended to just get a video card along with a good mobo.

depending on the ram, it’s more cost-effective to just get 4gb of ram, 4×1gb dimms.

i got 2 sets of Corsair Twin2X2048-6400C4, which came out to about $70 for 4GB of ram. It was going to be more if i were to get 2×1GB + 2×512MB at the time…
Ideally, you would run 2 x 2 gigs of RAM in Dual Channel mode. Yes you won’t see the full 4 gigs, but you’ll probably see somewhere around 3-3.5 gigs. It’s totally dependant on your hardware, since it’s all about addressing space – the more toys onboard, and the larger the RAM on your video card, the less RAM your computer can see.
ok, so should i do 4 x 1gb or 2 x 2gb…

2 replies, 2 different opinions price isn’t that much of an option.

also, should i go with a 1gb video card, or will that cut into my precious usable ram? side question: is 1gb 8800gt better than the 512 mb?
The maximum 32bit value is 2^32 = 4,294,967,296… or 4gb…

This is addressing space your OS has to work with, but other hardware shares this besides just your system memory. If you have a 512mb video card it will need to use 512mb of that 4gb address space, I am not talking about just onboard video… even if you have an external card the memory on the card needs to be assigned addresses by the system, so your memory card will reduce your maximum effective system memory. Not only that but most add in cards and also some onboard hardware will use addressing space.

If you want to see just how much go to device manager from the system control panel and open the properties page for any random piece of hardware and open the resources tab and look at the entries labeled memory range. Add up all the memory ranges, do a quick hex to decimal conversion in calc, and you can determine how much address space each piece of hardware is consuming. Take the total of all of your hardwares address space and subtract from the physical limit of 4gb and that is the remainder of your address space, or the amount of effective physical memory your computer will be able to utilize

Or if your lazy take 4gb, subtract your video cards memory, and that is how much ram you should buy… usually around 3.5gb… so 4gb

oh shit, well… ok.

should i get a 1gb video card then, if it means i’ll only have (up to) 3.0 gb left? or should i stick with 512mb and install 4gb. (even though it means i won’t get it all)

if i should do 3, should i go 2 x 1gb, 2 x 512, or 3 x 1?
if i should do 4, should i do 2 x 2gb or 4 x 1gb?

what ever fits your budget.

note, larger dimms are more prone to errors than smaller dimms, but this is what i’ve seen with 4gb and 8gb dimms on my boxes at work. i’ve read a few stories on large bad dimms on other home pc forums.

read the reviews of the 1gb 8800gt. it’s not worth it over the 512mb 8800gt. might as well get a 512 8800gts.

ok, i’ll read up on it. the prices are low, so i was like what the hell, why not shell out the extra $40-$50 for the 1gb? but if it’s not going to give much extra performance and eat an extra 512mb ram from me, i should probably look for a good 512mb.
You should do it execution-style.

Seriously though, I did a search here…

…and found a copy of Vista Business x64 for 110 bucks. What kind of deal are you getting?

get two of the same type of chip, for each slot pairing.

You get a performance increase if you have identical ram chips in paired slots (doubles the bus width).

Honestly, go with 2×2 GB, or 4×1 GB.

And a 1GB video card is better than a 512 if you do high-end gaming, far worth the decrease you’ll see in available RAM.

wrong wrong wrong
windows can address approx 4GB of memory. This is ALL memory, video card & system

you are partially correct.

windows will only use 3gb of memory for the system max, 4gb max for system and all other devices. if the vid card is 1gb great. if the vid card is 1mb, the os is still limited to 3gb of ram for itself. the rest is addressed for all other devices and/or unused.

read up.

The memory issue is irrelevant if he just gets a copy of Vista x64. As previously noted, they’re not that expensive.

well, i’ve heard nothing but terror stories about compatibility

…also i’m sitting on a free copy of windows vista 32 bit business. (legit from academic alliance.) well, technically it’s an upgrade disc, but there’s a workaround i read about. it still works right?

Not to correct you again, but it’s wrong. I have seen 3.5 gigs of ram on a 32 bit XP installation with no funky settings. This was a fresh install. I don’t know why MS has that info posted – it’s simply incorrect. Then again, maybe it is something they added to Vista.

ram "reported" by vista doesn’t mean it’s the memory used. vista 32-bit initial install will report 3.5gb of ram, xp pro sp2+ will report 3.5 gb of ram. xp home will report 3GB of ram. vista sp1 will report 4gb. read that kb. vista/xp can report whatever it wants.

the 32-bit kernel will only address 3.12 gb of ram for the OS. This is from Microsoft’s mouth.
Read it yourself, it uses words like "typically", and repeats what I said – it all depends on what other onboard devices are present. Throw in a 32 meg matrox video adaptor and your ram will go up. It’s all about addressing space – 4 gigs max.

The way I read it, there is a 3.12GB hard limit in 32-bit Vista to avoid driver compatibility issues. The number of devices can reduce the max addressable memory to below 3GB, but the typical system will be able to address up to the hard limit.

That’s because the people who don’t have compatibility problems don’t say anything. You know the rule: if something goes well, you tell your best friend; if something goes badly, you tell everyone.

I have not had any luck installing Vista upgrades from scratch. I specifically tried doing that, and it just kept saying either "you already have windows installed, you need to run this setup from within windows" or "you don’t have windows installed, you can’t install this because it’s an upgrade". I think they wised up after the rampant piracy and ripping-off of XP.

+1

oh fuck.
Vista x64. Commence installation of a gazillion GB of RAM.

but i’ve got this free 32-bit copy

Just go with 32-bit. So, you’ll waste a half gig…3.5>2
I am pretty sure it isn’t the actually physical video card memory that is accounted for in the 4GB, but the video aperture. Virtual memory that is kept allocated when the video cards run out of physically memory.

My system before I installed a 64-bit OS, had 4GB of ram, and a 512mb videocard, yet I had 3.75GB or memory available to me. It depends on the motherboard you are using as it determines how much virtual memory is allocated for the aperture. You use to be able to adjust this settings on AGP motherboard, but with PCIe it is no longer an option in the bios.

for speed of access, all devices that have I/O have a memory address associated with them. The keyboard, video card, harddrives, etc, all have this. Thus the more memory space reserved to address the hardware reduces the available system memory.
Nonetheless, it is the video aperture that defines how much of the system’s RAM addresses get assigned to the video RAM.

yeah, but now i get told that the "upgrade trick" may not work.

goddamn it, i have a copy of legal copy of vista and i still might be forced to end up pirating it.
jesus christ you guys are splitting hairs… the video aperature is for all intents and purposes the video ram… it is how the OS addresses the video cards memory… if you have you aperature set to less than your physical video memory… why?

you don’t like having your video card fully operational?
I checked the windows system info tool on 2 machines that are equipped with 512mb video cards. One machine shows ~256mb of address space reserved for the vid card, the other shows ~384mb reserved. Both are PCI-e, so there isn’t an adjustable aperture in the bios. So, it doesn’t look like there is a 1:1 correspondence between vid memory and the address space reserved. My guess is that it depends on how the vid card wants to communicate.
Hmm… I guess a portion of memory is being reserved for internal operations and not directly addressable by the system

The point is that you can (and have to) manually set the video aperture, therefore you can’t say it’s the same thing as the size of the video RAM. It should be, yes, but that doesn’t mean it actually is.

Huh? PCI-E disables the manual setting and you can’t override it? That’s news to me.

Are you sure it isn’t just that the BIOS is lame?

I’ve never seen an option in any bios (on PCI express motherboards) for changing the video aperture size, and I’ve owned 9-10 of them.

Well shit. I hope the firmware programmers knew what they were doing when they wrote code that detected half of the total video RAM, then.

Read up. The aperture setting on AGP boards did not specify the actual size of the MMIO address range. It was basically a service provided by the chipset to map additional system ram for use by the video card. PCI-e video cards do not rely on the chipset for this extra memory mapping, so you won’t find an aperture setting in the BIOS.

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February 2nd, 2009 | Tags: Academic Alliance, device manager, driver, Dual Channel, identical ram chips, Microsoft, Microsoft Vista, onboard devices, onboard hardware, ram, USD, video ram, virtual memory, XP | Category: general | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL