It's almost certainly the 32-bit Windows 4GB memory address limit combined with the hardware in your system, especially the 9800gx2, which may use up over 1GB of those addresses on its own.
---------------
e2160@3GHz: OCing my way to Ubuntuland!
Vista thinks it needs half of your ram so it caches, takes what it thinks it needs, and leaves you the rest for the rest of your apps.
This is the advanced intelligence built into Vista.