512MB sticks of DDR2 8500 available???

[dan_aka_jack]

Hi there,

I have 2GB (2 x 1GB) of Crucial Ballistix DDR2 8500 (1066MHz) in my Xeon (Quad Core2) and I want to upgrade. As I understand it, it's a waste to put 4GB of RAM on a WinXP32 system because WinXP will only see 3GB because it uses the top 1GB of address space for IO.

So - I want to buy 2 x 512GB sticks of Crucial Ballistix DDR2 8500. But it seems that the minimum size for DDR2 8500 is 1GB!

What to do? Does anyone know if 512GB DDR2 8500 is available? If not, I guess I'll have to upgrade to 4GB. Is there a way to make WinXP32 see at least 3.5GB of RAM?

Thanks,
Jack

 

[Mr Jack]

How much it will see depends on your system setup, and mostly on your graphics card - what have you got?

 

[dan_aka_jack]

Hi Mr Jack!

Thanks for the swift reply. Here are some of my system specs:

Graphics card: ATI X1050 128MB PCI-E
Mobo: Gigabyte P35-DQ6 (Intel P35 chipset)

Thanks,
Jack

 

[Defcon5]

How much it will see depends on your system setup, and mostly on your graphics card - what have you got?

Are you sure? Windows doesnt see GDDR as system memory surely?

I dont know for sure, but the spec of your system is irrelevant, it all depends on the OS. Thats what Ive always understood anyway

 

[WJA96]

You really won't see any performance improvement from the extra RAM with XP32 - 3Gb or 2Gb and thinking ahead, you'll have a tough time selling 512Mb sticks of DDR2 in a year's time, PC8500 or not.

The 3Gb thing only works if you fool the OS into thinking it's in server compatability mode anyway and that reduces performance, not increases it.

 

[WJA96]

Are you sure? Windows doesnt see GDDR as system memory surely?

32-bit Operating systems can only address 4Gb of memory in total. The graphics card memory all has to pass through system RAM, so the system maps it a chunk all of it's own. That chunk is the size of the graphics card's RAM and it can occupy real or virtual memory depending on the amount of RAM in the system.

I dont know for sure, but the spec of your system is irrelevant, it all depends on the OS. Thats what Ive always understood anyway

You are correct in that the spec of the system is irrelevant in one way, and yet you cannot completely divorce the OS and the hardware as they work together.

 

[dan_aka_jack]

Hi,

Thanks for all the replies.

So, if I understand correctly, I'm a bit stuck(!)

The reason I want more RAM is because I do some pretty big images in PhotoShop and, even with 2GB, PhotoShop can grind to a halt when it starts using the swap file.

But, if I understand correctly, I'm out of options because PhotoShop can only use 2GB of RAM. If I stick 3GB into my WinXP32 system then - as discussed above - it wont help much. If I went to WinXP64 then am I right in thinking that PhotoShop (being a 32-bit app and all) will still only be able to address 2GB of RAM? (Vista is out of the question for the time being because it doesn't play well with some of my video editing hardware).

Thanks,
Jack

 

[Defcon5]

Thanks WJA96, never knew that!

@ Jack, if you currently have 2gb, then some of that will be used up by windows and any other progs you have running, so if you get 3gb, then there will be a full 2gb free for photoshop to use.