this 4gb ram question is very annoying....

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NewFox

I have seen this question swim arround the newsgroups for more than a year..
ever since ram has become cheap...

they say that 4 gb is not seen by the os..they go on an endless blaber about
how the
extra memory is used by the system...

So at 3 gb no memory is used.. and at 4 gb suddenly the hardware says..
time to eat up some ram! lol

Ok so this is the question:

You have 3 gb.. and the os sees 3 gb... everything is fine..
you stick another 1 gb inside to reach 4 gb (the os still reports 3 gb)

What happens? Do you see any improvment at all or did you just waste
the money for the 1 extra gb?

In other words performance of a 3 and 4 gigabyte system is exactly
identical?

According to what I have understood the memoryt addresses are used, so even
if you have 4 gigs it cannot see or use it.. its worthless of getting 4 gb..
you might as well get only 3
 
imo, yes it is a waste having 4gb on a 32bit OS.
i didnt see ANY improvements at all in day-to-day use, or in benchmarks.

HOWEVER take a look at
http://www.bcchardware.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=3135&Itemid=40&limit=1&limitstart=3
pictures speak a thousand words.

on 32bit OS: no, 4gb is not worth it since you loose 1gb+ to system
resources, and i personally have not seen any increase in performance
visually or in benchmarks
64bit OS: yes, if your considering 4gb, then it is worth it.

vista runs so damn sweet on my system.
AMD Opteron 146 @ 2.7ghz
4x 1gb PC3200 ram ('generic' Elixir ram) @ 240fsb, 2.5-3-3-8-2T
DFI SLI-DR mobo
X-Fi
7800GTX SLI.

however, creative (and i think hauppauge too) have issues with 4gb
currently. creative crackles randomly. one day it can be fine all day,
othertimes you could need to restart to 'cure' the problem every
1-2hours. sounds just like a bad connection, but it's a known issue with
4gb ram thats been around since XP64. restart solves it.
my hauppauge USB-PVR2 BSODs on vista 32bit - this COULD be due to the
system resource allocation when using 4gb. since there are no 64bit
drivers for the USB-PVR2 as of yet, i cant comment any further.

tim
 
According to what I have understood the memoryt addresses are used, so even
if you have 4 gigs it cannot see or use it.. its worthless of getting 4 gb..
you might as well get only 3
Click to expand...

With a 32-bit OS, you're correct unless you have dual-channel RAM.
Then your RAM will run slower with three SIMMs instead of 4.
Of course with a 64-bit OS, you'll use all 4GB directly so if there's
ever a possibility you might upgrade the OS later, get the 4GB.

Tom Lake
 
Tom said:
With a 32-bit OS, you're correct unless you have dual-channel RAM.
Then your RAM will run slower with three SIMMs instead of 4.
Click to expand...

You don't necessarily have three DIMMs in order to have 3GB -- I have 3GB in
my system, consisting of a pair of 1GB DIMMs and a pair of 0.5GB DIMMs.

Anyway, with this configuration, both XP and Vista (both 32-bit) report my
total system ram as 2.75GB (the BIOS correctly reports 3GB). I've never
managed to get either OS to see even the full 3GB.
 
Tim Draper said:
imo, yes it is a waste having 4gb on a 32bit OS.
i didnt see ANY improvements at all in day-to-day use, or in benchmarks.

HOWEVER take a look at
http://www.bcchardware.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=3135&Itemid=40&limit=1&limitstart=3
pictures speak a thousand words.

on 32bit OS: no, 4gb is not worth it since you loose 1gb+ to system
resources, and i personally have not seen any increase in performance
visually or in benchmarks
64bit OS: yes, if your considering 4gb, then it is worth it.
Click to expand...

The fact that frame-rates in games increase with more ram is a pretty good
case for adding ram. However, the performance test compared 2 gigs to 4
gigs. I'd like to see some tests comparing 3gigs to 4gigs. Even though the
extra gig is not available to applications if the OS is using it then that
should leave more of the available 3gigs for the applications, yes? Is
there some way to measure this?

Regarding not seeing any improvement in day to day use, that would depend on
how heavily you load the system. I think you need to use games, Photoshop
editing large files, etc. to see the difference. I run XP with 1 gig and
the only time I see significant paging is when I process large numbers of
digital photos.
 
The OS uses address space at the upper end of 4GB for reserved system space.
It doesn't matter whether or not you actually have those addresses as
physical ram. If you have less than 4GB the memory manager will do address
translation to physical ram as needed. If you have 4GB of physical ram the
memory manager does not need the translation but now has to fence off the
system space to prevent user programs from attempting to write there. The
BIOS also reserves some addresses in the same way for various devices. Even
though you see less than 4GB with 4GB installed, the OS is defintely using
all 4GB. This is not peculiar to Windows. I first saw it when I upgraded
an Atari 800 to max supported memory.
 
Another way to understand this is that the ram you see on the properties
page is the amount available to user programs. It is not neccessarily a
report on how much physical ram is actually on the box.
 
I dont think that is correct!.. something is wrong.. because on 64 bit it
can see 128 ish...GB's

I have seen that when a ram stick is not inserted tightly it may not be
registering...
I have to open the box and push em in for them to work correctly...

perhaps this is the case with one of your sticks?

what does the bios say?

How about a free diagnostic tool like the free CPU-Z what ram chips does it
find?
http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php
 
I want to get to the core of the matter. That was the problem with all the
posts regaurding this 4 gb thing.. people talked and talked and got
nowhere..

So here is the question, can you answer in a simple clear manner?

Ok, so if you have a 3 gb machine and a 4 gb machine that reports 3 gb,
you are saying that indeed there is a difference in performance?

Yes or No?


If you say yes, I doubt it.. but I am open if you can convince me... lol
 
Yes. You would not see much unless you are running very memory demanding
programs, then the more ram the better, but there is a slight perf gain just
by the memory manager not having to do address translation for the upper
range of memory addresses that are used by the system (it can just address
directly).
 
Ok, so if you have a 3 gb machine and a 4 gb machine that reports 3 gb,
you are saying that indeed there is a difference in performance?

Yes or No?


If you say yes, I doubt it.. but I am open if you can convince me... lol
Click to expand...

IF you are using three 1 GB SIMMs on a machine with dual-channel
capability or IF you run huge programs simultaneously that fit in 4 GB
but not 3 GB THEN you will see a performance increase by using four
SIMMs.

If not, there's NO performance increase in going from 3 to 4 GB.

Tom Lake
 
Ben said:
Ignore this post, as it is wrong. The post above by Colin is correct.
Click to expand...

How so? I have benchmarks to prove that dual channel increases
memory speed and not using dual channel on a system that supports it
decreases memory speed. I can also prove that having enough RAM
to avoid going to the disk cache improved program speed.
So what part of my post do you disagree with?

Tom Lake
 
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