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Old 06-07-2006, 06:47 PM   #6 (permalink)
catback
Psycho
 
Location: North America
Quote:
Originally Posted by xepherys
Erm, no, again I don't think this is correct. Those "reserved" memory spots you see in device manager are slices of system RAM that are set aside for use by those hardware systems.

"PCI Bridge Device, IDE Controller, USB Devices, On-board Audio"

Aside from MAYBE your audio card, none of those have additional RAM ICs attached to them to ADD memory top the system, they just subtract available memory from system RAM.

If you look at the MS paper here, please note "Windows XP Professional x64 Edition supports up to 128 GB of physical RAM and 16 TB of virtual memory. By comparison, 32-bit Windows is capable of supporting up to 4 GB of system memory, with up to 2 GB of dedicated memory per process."

System memory does NOT include memory on other devices (such as video cards, RAID controllers, SCSI cards, audio cards, etc.).

My comments on video memory, however, fall apart when you use onboard video with Shared Memory Architecture (SMA) which is rare these days. The issue ius partially due to the fact that the system splits memory into 2GB app and 2GB kernel. PCI devices ALWAYS steal a little memory. Another card will steal memory no matter what it is or if it has onboard memory or not.
Everything in a computer is memory and is addressed, with 32-bit you only have 32-bits to work with which is 4GB...doesn't matter if it's a memory chip or a IC, to the computer it's just another memory location to work with. As far as the subtracting from the system memory, it doesn't happen that way...system memory has it's own address's just like all the other devices in the computer, what can happen is system memory can be reserved for particular use. The area where it can get cloudy is with hard drives, cd/dvd drives, and the like...simple explanation is the controller on the hard drive or cd/dvd drive has an address the computer can talk to and it then tells the controller what to do (get this or put this), the computer doesn't directly access the hard drive or cd/dvd.
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