OK, here's how it works:
There are several factors involved - the first, and most important, is your motherboard - many older motherboards will not support above 3GB - this is not because it is a 32bit system, or because of windows, or anything other than the specific chip-set and motherboard design.
Secondly,
all 32bit systems support a 4GB
address space - and what is an 'address space'? Well, it is, in layman's terms, the amount of 'memory' available to each process (application) that is running - now, due to cleverness, this 4GB doesn't all need to exist within physical memory - some may be in the swap file - and so, every process that is running can,
in theory, use a whole 4GB all to itself.
Thirdly, and the reason most people think a 32bit system doesn't support 4GB, is that in x86 systems various parts of the hardware (e.g. IO device (USB ports, etc, etc) as well as video and sound cards) use 'memory mapped IO' - that is, in order for the operating system to communicate with the hardware, the hardware is given an area of memory that it and the OS use to pass data between each other.
So, what does this mean? Well, essentially,
if your mobo supports 4GB of physical RAM, you can install 4GB and it
will work, but, when you boot into windows it will tell you it has 3-and-a-bit GB (the 'and-a-bit' varies in size, depending on the hardware involved) - this is perfectly normal and does not mean that the missing RAM is not working, just that it is not available for applications.
So, in short, yes it'll work (probably).
Oh, and yes, it'll still run in dual-channel mode.
Last edited by Scorpion0x17 (2008-07-28 20:30:22)
