Munku

A friend of mine is saying it's rather pointless to go over 1.5 gigs of ram as XP can only use a max of 1 gig to any one program.. Is this true? What's the real max on ram in a comp?

Wingless

*insert "OMG WTF how much f*ing RAM do you NEED!!!!111oneoneden!!" here*

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merkerguitars

From Microsofts website....Different OS's can only handle so much..and the mobo can only support so much..

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Munku

He was basically saying it could only allocate 1 GB to any one program, so say you had a nice game going, it could place 1 gb towards that one game tops.

Honestly man, I don't understand what your problem is, but that was totally uncalled for. I don't know what board you came from before but most people don't appreciate that sort of stuff here. Take your trolling garbage elsewhere please.

bendsley

Actually, its not the OS that really controls the ram as it is the 32-bit addressing on processors. A 32-bit processor can handle up to 4gb of ram.

XP will only handle so much of the ram, because thats what Microsoft wants it to do. I believe the max limit XP allows you to allocate is 4gb of ram per processor. But then how many dual processor machines do you know of that have 8gb of ram in them that run Windows XP? It's very uncommon.

Microsoft has their OS limit the amount of ram accessible so that you would have to pay to upgrade the OS to allow for what you want. Example: We are running Exchange Standard on a machine and the standard version will only allow up to 16gb mail store. Well, if it goes over the 16gb limit, the Exchange Mail volume basically just un-mounts itself until you get your thumb out of your ass to fix it and get it below 16gb. Note, this is 16gb after it's passed through our spam filter (ouch). So, we had to end up upgrading to the Exchange Enterprise edition to have unlimited mail store space.

I guess I'm trying to say that the OS is the second factor in how much ram you can address, but the 32-bit processor is your first obstacle.

64-bit will be able to address 18.446 Petabytes of RAM (I hope I calculated correctly, it´s 2^64).

Since most motherboards do only support three slots with up to one GB of RAM each, 64 bit is rather a marketing trick at the moment, just like Intel with its rising GHz power.

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Munku

So the point is basically, is that I wont have to worry about it since I probably wont be putting in the cap amount anyways? :P

bendsley

Well, if you're not going to use 4gigs of ram, then I wouldn't worry about it. Many applications, including WindowsXP like to get their hands on as much ram as possible. If you have more physical ram available, and tell your OS not to use virtual memory (making the harddrive act as extra ram), then your applications will load much more quickly.

See this link for more info.

What is Virtual Memory?
A program instruction on an Intel 386 or later CPU can address up to 4GB of memory, using its full 32 bits. This is normally far more than the RAM of the machine. (The 32nd exponent of 2 is exactly 4,294,967,296, or 4 GB. 32 binary digits allow the representation of 4,294,967,296 numbers — counting 0.) So the hardware provides for programs to operate in terms of as much as they wish of this full 4GB space as Virtual Memory, those parts of the program and data which are currently active being loaded into Physical Random Access Memory (RAM). The processor itself then translates (‘maps’) the virtual addresses from an instruction into the correct physical equivalents, doing this on the fly as the instruction is executed. The processor manages the mapping in terms of pages of 4 Kilobytes each - a size that has implications for managing virtual memory by the system.

What is loaded in RAM?

Items in RAM can be divided into:

The Non-Paged area. Parts of the System which are so important that they may never be paged out - the area of RAM used for these is called in XP the ‘Non-Paged area’. Because this mainly contains core code of the system, which is not likely to contain serious faults, a Blue Screen referring to ‘Page Fault in Non-Paged area’ probably indicates a serious hardware problem with the RAM modules, or possibly damaged code resulting from a defective Hard disk. It is, though, possible that external utility software (e.g. Norton) may put modules there too, so if such faults arise when you have recently installed or updated something of this sort, try uninstalling it.
The Page Pool which can be used to hold:
--Program code,
--Data pages that have had actual data written to them, and
--A basic amount of space for the file cache (known in Windows 9x systems as Vcache) of files that have recently been read from or written to hard disk.

Any remaining RAM will be used to make the file cache larger.

Why is there so little Free RAM?

Windows will always try to find some use for all of RAM — even a trivial one. If nothing else it will retain code of programs in RAM after they exit, in case they are needed again. Anything left over will be used to cache further files — just in case they are needed. But these uses will be dropped instantly should some other use come along. Thus there should rarely be any significant amount of RAM ‘free’. That term is a misnomer — it ought to be ‘RAM for which Windows can currently find no possible use’. The adage is: ‘Free RAM is wasted RAM’. Programs that purport to ‘manage’ or ‘free up’ RAM are pandering to a delusion that only such ‘Free’ RAM is available for fresh uses. That is not true, and these programs often result in reduced performance and may result in run-away growth of the page file.

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Confederate

Ok just to clear this up, what he did was not insulting. It is making fun of people that would say something like that. If he was serious he wouldnt have included the "insert here" part. It is a preemptive statement because at one point in this thread someone was going to say something like that.

theburner

The upper limit on all of the single cpu mobo's I have encountered is 4GB. As mentioned above, that is XP's limit also.

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bendsley

That is XP's limit because Microsoft chooses so, not because the OS can't handle more. Also, thats also the limit on single cpu motherboards that handle 32-bit processors. It may be on most 64-bit cpu boards that this is the case because otherwise you would have up to 8 rows for memory sticks.

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Pragma

I think you're a little confused. It's XP's limit because that's the limit of 32-bit architecture, not because Microsoft chooses so.

I have run 32-bit systems (using Win2k AS and Win2k3 ES) with 8GB of RAM, and PAE isn't all that stable. It also doesn't give you the same advantages of 64-bit addressing. A program, on a system with 8GB of RAM, can only draw out of one "bank" of memory (you'll have two banks, 0-4GB, 4GB-8GB) - so a program can only benefit from 4GB of RAM.

With 64-bit architecture, that problem goes away - but there's not a lot out there that can really take advantage of it. Having 8 sticks of RAM in a computer isn't that big of a deal, assuming you're using servers. I've dealt with a bunch of 1U servers with 8 memory sticks, and some larger servers with 32 memory sticks - it's all in the type of computer.

Your average desktop isn't capable of handling more than 4, but lots of other computers can

bendsley

The OS can certainly be modified to allow for further memory addressing. Microsoft makes Win2k3 Server Standard allow for only up to 4 gigs of ram, while if you upgrade to enterprise, you get unlimited.

Yes, I have worked with plenty of systems as well as we use a quad xeon machine with 16 gigs of ram for our SQL server. I understand having 8 sticks of ram in a machine isn't a big deal, but thanks for pointing that out.

What I'm trying to get at is that on home based systems with 32-bit processors, Microsoft chose to allow WinXP to only be able to address 4gig of ram. At the same time, Microsoft has Win2k3 which can address a lot more than 4 gig, that's what I'm saying about Microsoft choosing so.

Maybe you misunderstood me?

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bendsley

somehow, my above entry was posted twice, this is an edit to remove duplicates.

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