4Gb Ram, Vista Ultimate 32-bit and Turbocache

I read in the forums somewhere that there's no point in having a laptop with more than 2Gb RAM unless you have a 64-bit Windows OS. My question is whether the extra RAM is "wasted" even if the video card and its GPU have support for nvidia turbocaching or its ATI equivalent.

 

Yes. It still is. Your system still can't use more than 3.2-3.3 gbs.

 

Does that mean having 4Gb of RAM in a laptop is no different than having 3.2-3.3Gb of RAM for system use and turbocaching?

 

no but if you have a 8700 m gt with 128+ 384 = 512 mb trurbocache than perhaps some 256 ram will be used from system to compenhaste vram, but i doubt that you see any performance increase or decrease.

 

That's useful to know. When I do get round to buying my gaming machine I'll probably settle for 4GB anyway for a future upgrade to 64-bit OS when all the teething problems are sorted out.

 

Remember that the 3.2-3.3 GB limit is not imposed solely on the RAM itself. The computer as a whole only has a maximum number of addressable "points." I believe that 32 bit Windows allows for a maximum number of addresses around 4 GB, so you'd think that you could use 4 GB of RAM.

Wait a moment and think it out.

Estimate that components such as your processor caches, motherboard I/O destinations, Network cards, CD/DVD drive will take up about .5 GB of the theoretical 4 GB. These MUST have addresses or they cannot function.

Now add in all of your vRAM (the amount of ram on your video card), that ram will also need a set of addresses. We'll estimate 256 MB of vRAM.

So now you've taken your theoretical 4 GB of ram space, subtracted 500 MB for essential system components needing addresses, subtracted 256 MB of vRAM on your video card needing addresses. So, total, you've just taken away 756 MB of your theoretical RAM limit. Let's round that that 800 MB to be safe. 4 GB (Theoretical limit) - 800 MB (used addresses by components and video card memory) = 3.2 GB of RAM.

This is exactly why I don't like the notion of buying a video card with more than 512MB of ram, like those limited edition cards, or 8800GTX cards. All of that vRAM is going to suck precious RAM addresses from your main system.

Now consider the slap in the face SLI 8800 GTX's would be to system addressing. They take up 768 MB of vRAM each. So that is 1536 MB of vRAM total. Now you are probably down to something like 2GB of RAM addresses available for the system.

Heh. So the point is, the world NEEDS to get it's butt over to 64-bit sometime soon. Gamers are going to start to feel the burn soon when suddenly they have no more RAM to play with while SLIing.

Regardless, I'd still get the 4GB of RAM. As you said, at least you have it all for whenever you DO decide to go 64-bit.

 

Which is why I am befuddled why Microsoft didn't make Vista 64-bit ONLY. If anything, at least it would have been successful at making this abortion OS to do *something* worthwhile. If we're all required to move to Vista, then why not make it 64-bit???

 

RE Teething problems. I am running 64bit right now and there are none. It is very stable and has shown improvements in stability, disk performance, speed and so on.

As a bit of a comparison, I have included my HDTune tests on my SSD. The first is 32bit and the second is 64bit. It shows substantial increases in all areas except CPU usage which went down. Cant wait to get 4Gb for this!!!

 

Sounds very nice flamenko, I should consider trying 64-bit. I'm going to have to be careful, though, as this is a MacBook Pro I'm on at the moment, and I'm not sure how bootcamp would react to 64-bit Vista.

 

That's really nice, but I'm curious as to which version of 64-bit Vista you're using. My main concern is that some games and applications are still incompatible on the OS.

 

I'm running 64 bit right now and there is one. (The multi-application freeze problem.)

 

I just build a desktop, and I went with 4gbs of RAM on my 32 bit Vista Ultimate OEM. Vista in general has a few issues and incompatibilities. Most hardware seems very good with 64 bit support lately, but you might run into some lesser known hardware issues, say for example a webcam or a headphone or something like that.

The reason they don't make it necessary for 64 bit yet is because most people don't need it and most PC users don't buy what they don't need...read that most don't even have Vista yet and most would never buy an 8600 GT or above for graphics. Most people just want to surf the web and use Office applications, none of which need even 2gbs of RAM.

Having said that, my OS recognizes 3.5gbs out of the total 4gbs of RAM that I have installed. So a 32 bit OS only takes away .5gbs....that's not bad. And you get an extra 1.5gbs over the 2gbs that you asked us about, which is a HUGE jump in RAM.

Most people tell me I'll never use 2.5 or 3gbs. I'm running Ultiamte Dreamscene in the background (motion desktop) along with antivirus, media player, two messengers and the Internet and right now I'm using less than 1.5gbs.

I'll summarize by saying that even 3 gbs would be far more than you'll need for a long, long time (probably as long as Vista is out). And even a 32 bit OS will recognize all of it. Whoever told you 2 gbs is the max you'll see is not correct, because I'm actually using 3.5gbs right now. Hope this info. helps. I'd consider an upgrade to 64 bit a few years down the road, but it's not worth the very little benefit it offers right now due to exisiting issues with support.