Widescreen Gaming Forum

all things considering
do you think i'm bottlenecking my system if i put a gtx275 1792mb card in to this system

short answer : no ;)

so is xp 32bit isn't it?
even with the 1792mb version

yeah i made a typo i meant to put 4096.

but i dont quite think it is quite as cut and dry or consistent as you insist Whismer.

My gfs machine should have 4096-512-x. when she had her old 256MB card it was slightly higher than it is now, but not 256MB different

some guy here....

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/page-258883_15_0.html

2x 512MB graphics cards in SLI, 4GB ram and a 32bit XP OS and he gets 2GB RAM aparently. when he removes a card a lot of memory returns.

im not saying your wrong, what i was trying to say was it might be a problem depending on what game you are running. i have 0 problems, i run XP x64, sometimes when running 2 accounts on WoW with a lot of stuff open i get near 3GB used ram according to task man, depening what you are doing, with nearly 2GB graphics ram and the so called "4gb limit" on 32bit os (before you factor in PAE) might be "near the limit" as the man in the interview on the Tomshardware link said.

and as for no correlation... a 1792MB gpu will not only reseve 2MB to play nicely with the rest of the system

it is exactly as I said, if you don't believe me read the microsoft technical titbits they explain it all, though I admit that when I said between 3 to 3.5 GB, I should have said "in the general case", with a lot of devices (like SLI, QuadSLI ... but not limited to gfx cards) you can go below that

SLI means two gfx card which means each single one will reserve memory addresses. I don't know him or his computer but you shall not believe what everyone says on the internet without proofs.

I am a tech guy, I answer people : basic story :

Then the phone hangs abruptly as soon as he pressed that button, because he found a floppy in the drive which prevented his computer from starting and he was too ashamed to admit he was wrong ...
which is why I had to "lie" to get him to do what I wanted.

you may think it's a popular joke but it's not, I lived it and I talked to that guy personally.

bottom line, "bullshit talk" on the internet is not rare
plus as long as you're not in front of his computer you can't really say.

EDIT: this guy either have a lot of devices, but he don't say the real amounts nor what's in the computer, so it's difficult to say but you might want to know that some options in the BIOS control how memory is handled and if "memory remap" is enabled 2GB could be the highest the OS would go on a 32 bit system

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929605

so is xp 32bit isn't it?
even with the 1792mb version

xp 32bit limits your maximum available amount of ram...
is it a bottleneck ? probably not
though depending on what you use your computer for, it could be...
for example "Supreme Commander" uses a lot of RAM on 82km² maps with high unit limits & lots of players, enough to get past my 4GB of available memory on XP64 and crash. This is an example though and not the general case !!!

i hope i'm not being a pain to anyone
but what about oc'ing my cpu to about 3.0mhz

that would help as well i suppose
are there any good guided how to do that?
i've googled but keep getting forum threads, instead of the actual how to's


thx for all ur help

i hope i'm not being a pain to anyone
but what about oc'ing my cpu to about 3.0mhz

that would help as well i suppose
are there any good guided how to do that?
i've googled but keep getting forum threads, instead of the actual how to's


thx for all ur help

sorry but I won't give you any links myself
why ?
because your knowledge about computers is a bit limited you need to learn more by yourself, then we could talk about overclocking your CPU.
you need to search & read for hours & days.

overclocking is a risky business although overclocking a Core2 to 3.0Ghz is easy enough, you still run the risk to put the wrong setting in the wrong place & break your computer.
If anyone wants to give you links, it's fine by me, but I won't do it.

fair enough!
i can't say thans enough for the help and info you (all) have given already!

:wink:

no video memory & main memory are two completely different thing which don't add up.
- video memory is just for the graphic card and store what should be displayed on screen and other data which will be processed by the graphic card. (like textures for example)
-main memory is for everything else.

Yes.

This doesn't alter the fact that a 32-bit OS can only address 4GB of memory.

The problem is, many people take 'memory' to mean 'RAM'. When referring to the 4GB limit, 'memory' is the total addressable memory space and not just the RAM installed. It’s a total made up of system RAM, graphics RAM, PCI memory range, ACPI and a few other bits and pieces. Every device on or plugged into the motherboard needs a memory addressable space in order to operate.

'Internet wisdom' seems to have created the myth that on a 32-bit OS, you can take that 4GB, subtract the amount of RAM on the graphics card, and that will give you RAM available for use. The problem is... it worked for some of the 256MB cards back when AGP was dominant - take 4GB, subtract 256MB, you end up with 3.75GB of usable RAM (I tried this with an Asus A8V board once). I don't know what tricks nVidia and ATi have used for being able to address gigabytes of memory on their cards without mapping each bit to the 32-bit total addressable memory space, but it's a neat one... the picture is further muddied by SLI and CrossFire, which seem to obey some dark rules that no one quite understands when it comes to treatment of addressable memory - since the contents of the VRAM is mirrored in each set of GPU memory... it should on paper at least, be treated as one set of memory... almost like RAID1. For some reason... it isn't. I've not read enough about the technicalities of the two techs to know.

However, this is getting out of the remit of the original discussion and will result in technical details that will likely leave 2Air scratching his or her head even less certain of which choice s/he should be making with respect to Operating System. :)

if you really really don't want Windows se7en 64 bit then windows XP 64 bits is also an option.

Windows XP 64-bit is only an option if you want a lot of headaches. Drivers for it are often few and far between (printers, scanners etc frequently don't have drivers) and those that do exist are flaky and some are missing features (I'm thinking of Creative here...)

I was running XP64 for a while for technical reasons... and if I could have got my hands on the source code for the program I was using and compiled it in 64-bit linux... I would have done. I have never had any other incarnation of Windows give me that many headaches - even when I was looking after PCs running Windows ME.

In short, XP64 isn't really an option. There is no reason to avoid Windows 7 64-bit - I've been using it since public beta and it works great. Not found anything that doesn't like it yet. It's the first time I've ever installed an OS and not needed to install one single driver. I updated the ATi drivers and installed Catalyst Control Centre (despite how much I dislike it...) but it wasn't necessary to do that to get games running happily.

...

XP64 is used by a bunch of people on matbe.com without any kind of problems it really depends on what you do and what peripherals you have
XP64 uses Win2k3 64 kernel, so Win2k3 drivers are sometimes an option too... Anyway, never had a problem with XP64 except an old printer not recognized anymore. Comparing winMe and XP64 is really really far
both kernels are not of the same quality at all...
To each his own, I'm just giving options, in any case I think he'll probably not buy any license and keep winXP32 ;)

As for the fact that a 32 bit OS can only address up to 4GB of memory, I already said it before ;)

It’s a total made up of system RAM, graphics RAM, PCI memory range, ACPI and a few other bits and pieces

I wouldn't say that it's made up of gfx RAM. since there's only a range of virtual addresses allocated to it but whatever...

I don't care about internet wisdom either, I only take my information from trusted sources like microsoft msdn blogs and the like, that is people who know a bit what they talk about ;)

I have my quad overclocked to 3.6