Another 32bit OS/4Gb RAM Issue

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Afternoon fellas, as the title says i stuck 4Gb of spare Corsair RAM into my 32bit OS system.

Windows shows 2.25GB, CCleaner shows 2.2GB & CPU-Z shows 4GB.

Now, I know the last one is wrong as you can only get a max of 3GB on a 32-bit OS, thing is, why am i not getting 3GB showing?

Also, will putting this in affect my system? Should I return to my 2GB?

Thanks in advance guys.
 
Check this MS kb article

In the 'Cause' section you'll find a fairly good explanation otherwise try googling for 'MMIO 32 bit memory limit' or some other combination... there's plenty of articles around about this one.
 
32bit can adrress 4gb of memory total. all devices come first. So subract your gfx card/s and anything else with memory. Then what ever room is left is what you can see in ram. Just get 64bit. if your on vista you can get the 64bit cd oem or retail for ~£7
 
Method said:
PNY 9600GT 512MB is in the system atm.
Click to expand...

Weird. You should get around 3.2GB with that config.

32-bit can technically address 4GB of RAM, however expansion cards like video cards, sound cards etc remap their onboard memory to the top end of this range hence why most people see around 3.2GB RAM. Might be worth checking that the graphics driver isn't using system RAM as a top up?

CPU-Z is reporting correctly - the BIOS sees 4GB of RAM before it starts clowning around with the remaps for expansion cards.

Why MS got it wrong again beats me - we went through this in the DOS/Windows 3 days with the 640KB limit and extended memory etc.

A 64-bit OS is the best answer as suggested earlier.
 
MagicBoy said:
64-bit XP is a separate product and not very well supported anyway.
Click to expand...

If you can find the hardware drivers, XP 64 is an excellent product, Its also marketted as Windows Server 2003. Its fast, reliable, and very good. Only driver I couldnt find was a Sony/Ericcson driver for my mobile phone/usb.
 
is there any benefit in having 4G (or 3.2G in actual fact) of ram over 2G in windows XP 32bit?

I currently have 2G of ram in my PC which is an E6300 running at 3Ghz gigabyte ds4, Nvidia 8800GTS 640MB, no other cards or anything.

when i built it, ram was seriously expensive! £270 for 2 gigs if i remember rightly!!! but now its cheap as chips for ddr2.

I am about to buy some DDR2 for a HTPC i'm building, should i get 4G for my pc and put the 2 gigs in the HTPC??

Thoughts? will i see any benifit? will it still run in dual channel properly?

Thanks guys, and sorry to hijack!!
 
champ222 said:
I am about to buy some DDR2 for a HTPC i'm building, should i get 4G for my pc and put the 2 gigs in the HTPC??

Thanks guys, and sorry to hijack!!
Click to expand...

That's I did, then scrapped the HTPC project - hence 6GB...

I can't really tell any difference in XP between 2GB and 3.2GB.

I had Server 2008 on it setup as a workstation for a while and that was a lot faster on 6GB. It kept using the RAM as disk cache, so the HDD's would spin down for long periods.
 
hmmm..... i'll have to have a think. i cant see me going over to vista, i'll probably skip it all together and go for windows 7 next time around, by which time i guess i'll be looking at a new system anyway. so maybe i'll just stick to the 2GB for now, it seems to do everything i want it to do... but its so cheap....

I wonder how long it will be before ddr2 starts getting expensive..... like ddr is now

hmmmm.. i cant decide, any other thoughts guys?
 
If you intend to stay with your CPU, MB and DDR2 even when going to Windows 7 64 bit then I'd go ahead and upgrade the RAM to 4 Gb anyway it'll certainly make a difference in the future win 7 ( Using win 7 64 bit beta here atm ) as does also in win xp64 . It makes a little difference in win xp 32 (I tri boot Xp32/xp64/win7-64) but 64 bit will be where the main performance increases will come
 
i've a feeling that this could be a motherboard problem for myself, maybe it cant handle 2gb in 2 slots.
 
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