Is ram important?

[Zellio]

Im thinking of getting 4 gigs of ram. I have a e6400, an x1900xt 512 megs, and 2 gigs gskill ram.

Esp. with vista around the corner, I think ram may play a big role. Should I upgrade to both the Rd600 and 4 gigs of ram or just the RD600?

 

[fredgiblet]

It can't hurt, if you can afford it I'd say definitely upgrade, but wait for a little bit, RAM prices are spiking right now.

 

[Mex]

And you're posting this in the video card forum?

I would say 1GB bare minimum for Vista, and 2GB preferred. The problem with buying 4GB is that you'll be hitting the limits of 32 bit. If you're not going to be running Vista in 64 bit mode, then I think that anymore than 3GB of memory is a waste.

 

[Zellio]

Whoops, I keep forgetting whyere I am :-(

I don't understand this forum.

 

[levicki]

Im thinking of getting 4 gigs of ram. I have a e6400, an x1900xt 512 megs, and 2 gigs gskill ram.

Esp. with vista around the corner, I think ram may play a big role. Should I upgrade to both the Rd600 and 4 gigs of ram or just the RD600?

Just so you know you won't be able to use more than 3GB in XP. You would have to use x64 Edition util Vista comes out.

Of course, with x64 comes a bunch of driver availability and application compatibility issues. Just to name #1 -- if you have Creative card its driver won't allow you to use more than 3GB of RAM even in x64 Edition due to a bug which I am not sure if they have solved yet.

 

[MarkG]

Just so you know you won't be able to use more than 3GB in XP.

An individual application can't use more than 3GB, but multiple applications (and the operating system) can.

 

[levicki]

An individual application can't use more than 3GB, but multiple applications (and the operating system) can.

No they can't.

The OS can't address 4-th gigabyte of RAM because it is being shadowed by mainboard, PCI and PCI-E resources because they also use address space and in 32-bit OS they must be mapped below the 4GB limit. It means that if you have 2x 7900 GTX 512MB, just mapping the video RAM below 4GB will shadow 1GB out of your 4GB RAM. Onboard devices and addon cards will then take their chunk out of your 3nd gigabyte and you will end up having 2.xGB of RAM available for OS and thus for the applications.

The BIOS does have an optional setting to remap hardware addresses outside of the 4GB memory space when running the x64 OS.

When this option is enabled all resources are mapped above 4GB limit so the whole 4GB of RAM are fully visible to the OS and the applications which are linked with /LARGEADDRESSAWARE switch.

More info:
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/06/01/423817.aspx

As I said before, Creative audio drivers do not work as expected when the audio hardware gets remapped above 4GB limit. I am not aware if they have fixed this issue in their drivers but knowing their support "quality" I am inclined to believe they haven't touched it yet.