Scorpion0x17 wrote:
<*SIGH*>
Not this hot potato again.
OKAY, I'm only going to say this once.
32bit XP DOES support 4GB of physical RAM - whether it's PC3200, PC6400 or whatever.
However, in all systems, some memory addresses are 'mapped' to IO (meaning they're used to communicate with any peripherals, video card, sound card, and do on).
So, because the 32-bit address space is exactly 4GB, if you install 4GB of physical ram, the IO mapped addresses will hide some of the physical addresses.
How many addresses are hidden in this way varies from system to system, so there is no single maximum amount of ram that will be available to windows.
In fact, if one were to build a system that didn't use memory-mapped IO, windows would see all 4GB - but that's only in theory - all modern PCs use memory-mapped IO.
Now to answer the OP, yes you'll see some improvement going from 2GB to 4GB physical RAM, but not as much as you get from going from 1GB to 2GB, unless you do a lot of graphics/video/audio editing, or other tasks that require large amounts of RAM.
LOL!
Completely and totally right (although I remember arguing with you for ages over semantics regarding this - but that was over the physical/logical issue - I still say it supports 4GB of
logical memory, the 3.something GB physical and the rest for IO, making up a total of 4GB logical addressable space).
For all those who haven't paid any attention to Scorpion's (and rdx's) insightful post I'll try and simplify it even more.
Windows XP can use 4GB of memory. But that's the absolute maximum. Windows needs to use some memory space to talk to hardware, that means not all the 4GB can be used. If you turn some hardware off you can often increase the amount of available physical memory since the OS doesn't need to talk to it any more.
The idea that memory frequency has anything to do with it is absolutely retarded.
Unreal_Insanity wrote:
Little BaBy JESUS wrote:
san4 wrote:
Is that true? Sux.
yes its true... XP supports a maximum of 3.8 Gb of RAM ^^^
Actually 2.7 gigs or depends on the bandwidth of the memory. For example PC 3200 can get up tp 3.8 and PC 6400 can get up tp 2.7. So it depends on what you have.
If you don't have a clue what you're talking about, please don't offer advice to people in a tech forum. It's just going to confuse people.
Last edited by Bertster7 (2007-12-15 05:18:53)