Thought the max was 3gb?
6GB of RAM; 32 or 64-bit windows7 ?
- Thread starter animeguitarist
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Thought the max was 3gb?
Depends on chipset amongst other things. As a general rule it's about 3.5GB.
we were talking about the maximum memory a single 32bit application could address, not windows.
They need to drop 32-bit OSs now. I mean, computers are coming with 4Gb of ram as standard on all but the most budget PCs, and I doubt there's still ones being sold with 32-bit only CPUs. It just means we get threads like this, and means devs stick with making 32-bit programs 
You -can- override that, Something similar to PAE (but not PAE itself) that allows a 32bit process to use windows reserved address space or something and address more than 2gb of ram per process (up to the 3.5-4gb max). It can cause some weird side effects apparently, but I've not tried it myself.
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They need to drop 32-bit OSs now. I mean, computers are coming with 4Gb of ram as standard on all but the most budget PCs, and I doubt there's still ones being sold with 32-bit only CPUs. It just means we get threads like this, and means devs stick with making 32-bit programs
Intel Atoms?
I think I'll try it since the only game I really play is SupCom.
Oh, didn't realise that!
64. I have to say that since I've been running Windows7, I haven't had any issues with 32 bit mode at all with regards to running old apps. I would be surprised to see the next version of Windows offer a 32 bit version given the common nature of 64 bit processors at all price points in the market these days, from numerous manufacturers.
the limit is 2gb not 4.
2GB in user mode and 2GB in kernel mode. So 4GB of virtual memory in total, per 32-bit process.
There is a boot loader switch to change this balance to 3GB/1GB (user/kernel mode, respectively). But this is rarely needed.
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By default, a 32-bit process is limited to 4GB of virtual address space. Though, this is split up into two whereby 2GB is allocated to user mode and 2GB for the kernel. What you're referring to is the /3GB switch which changes this. Once the /3GB switch is in place, applications have access to 3GB of virtual address space but the kernel is limited to 1GB. Though, the application itself needs to be large-address-aware to take advantage of this.
If you're using an x64 operating system, then providing the application is set too large-address-aware, it will have access to 4GB of virtual address space - Memory Limits for Windows Releases.
The most notable example of a process coming up against the 2GB of virtual address space limit is Supreme Commanders. There is an article about it here on Anandtech. There was actually a thread on these forums not so long ago talking about this as well which can be found here.
That's the one, not used it myself as I've been using x64 for years.
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