BF2S Forums New ram

SchmilK wrote:

NO NO NO you do NOT have bad memory!!!  Windows cannot use more than 3 gig of ram efficiently.  The "lost ram" you are counting IS being used by windows, but its being used to address the ram that is listed.  From my experience running 4gb of ram will make your system run slower than using 3gb of ram which will be barely faster than running 2gb of ram....now vista on the other hand....HOLD ON TO YOUR KEYBOARD cause its going ot utilze all 4gbs and it NEEDS IT!!  That OS is such a hog and games realy do not perform as well on vista as xp...mostly cause drivers suck right now...i keep flip flopping back and forth and getting frustrated that that just a few weeks ago released SLI support for 7800gtx in vista...and it sucks..im sticking wiht xp until i got a quad core cpu...

SchmilK wrote:

Ah i thoguht ahead and editing that post...heres why
So when your memory test program requests a memory address, it fist gets sent to the 3-4gb range so that windows can find out where teh address of memory is located, then it gets redirected back to the actual location of the memory and by that time the memtest program says thats not right and throws an error.

recheck my previous post there may be more info in there.

SchmilK wrote:

  It's always fun to be helpful 

Scorpion0x17 wrote:

SchmilK wrote:

NO NO NO you do NOT have bad memory!!!  Windows cannot use more than 3 gig of ram efficiently.  The "lost ram" you are counting IS being used by windows, but its being used to address the ram that is listed.  So when your memory test program requests a memory address, it fist gets sent to the 3-4gb range to find out where teh address of memory is located, then it gets redirected back to the actual location of the memory and by that time the memtest program says thats not right and throws an error.

Ive delt with this at work a ton with pompous graphic artists saying they NEEEEED more ram...but they dont..they need to stop all the crap running in their task bar and all he windows blinds type programs making their skreen soo darn purty.

The problem is the 32bit operating system environment...that only leaves enough memory addresses to reach around 3gb. Move over to xp64 and it will be a bit better but you still wont see the full 4gb...you might only loose 256mb or so...  From my experience in Windows XP 32bit running 4gb of ram will make your system run slower than using 3gb of ram which will be barely faster than running 2gb of ram....now vista 64 on the other hand....HOLD ON TO YOUR KEYBOARD cause its going ot utilze all 4gbs and it NEEDS IT!!  That OS is such a hog and games realy do not perform as well on vista as xp...mostly cause drivers suck right now...i keep flip flopping back and forth and getting frustrated that that just a few weeks ago released SLI support for 7800gtx in vista...and it sucks..im sticking wiht xp until i got a quad core cpu...

Hmm... this is a new one on me - sorry if I led you down a garden path chipmunk...

Schmilk, I just want to check if I understand what you're saying correctly - are you saying that hardware, running applications and the windows kernel is using/reserving around 1.75GB of the total physical ram?

Scorpion0x17 wrote:

Chipmunk: How's the memory? Had any further errors or crashes and so on?

I was hoping Schmilk would have clarified his post because I've done some further reading and although he is correct in what he says about the way windows handles memory, I'm not so sure he's correct in stating that this is causing the errors you had reported by memtest.

You see, when you boot to the memtest CD/floppy, windows is not running. Therefore it's memory handling system can not be causing the errors. Memtest uses BIOS/CPU level memory access. It does not go through windows in any way. This is how it is able to directly address and test the whole of the installed memory (rather than just those bits windows allows it access to).

So, if you are still experiencing random errors and crashes that you weren't getting before, it still may be bad ram and more testing is required. It may also be an 'issue' (not necessarily something going wrong) with your motherboard. Or it may just be down to the fact that no two DIMMs are identical, no two ram slots are identical and no two motherboards are identical - you may just have a bad combination, rather than a single specific bad component.

CommieChipmunk wrote:

The funny thing is, when I ram test the old and the new ram separately everything works, but when I test them all together, I get an error every second or two (not exaggerating).  Hopefully I can get one of my uber-computer literate friends over here soon to further diagnose all of the problems...lol until then *crosses fingers*