Finally got my home build stable...one bad stick. I want to give Vista as much memory as it can use. I've got 3x1gb sticks of 800MHz PC6400 on a 680i with 2 8800gt's. Will I see any improvement with one more stick or is that overkill? I had to get this sucker from bsod'ing before I can think about overclocking. Everything's running really stable and clean now that I tracked down and fixed my stuff....bad memory gives such weird problems and even memtest86 had problems pinpointing it. Oh well, Q6600, Zerotherm Nirvana (awesome cooler), 2x150 raptors and a 1TB Seagate. Any real world performance increase with the less than 4 GB that Vista 32 will see or would I just be throwing money away?

If you will search the forums, you will find that 32-bit Windows really can only handle 3GB of RAM anyway. The only way that running 3X1GB of RAM will hurt performance is the fact it will only run in single channel mode, not dual channel.

Hmm, didn't know that. I thought it would only see about 3.5 or so and I was curious if there would be a performance increase of any kind, but no, huh? This is my first shot with Vista, so thanks.

u have 1gb in vram, ur system can only reconize 3gb.

Yes, so, I'm maxed out with what I have...ok. That answers it for me, thanks.

The first 2G should still run in dual channel just not the third, at least on Intel Chipsets i.e., P35 etc. Dual channel is overrated anyway.

Extra ram is extra ram. I just went 2 x 1024 and 2 x 512 when i had 3 gigs, In my case i would only get 3.25 with 4 gigs in anyway(3.6something with a 4meg pci card in).
 
Vista now shows the right ram amount, but you still only have access to about 3 gigs.
 
Its worth trying to keep dual channel in most cases(but as said above you will get dual channel Asymmetrical, good old intel).
 
This would be a waste, but I have Vista 64 on here too.

I personally benched dual channel and was disappointed, given all the hype. I've seen articles on THG, I think, and elsewhere that showed the same thing.

Very disappointed.  

yeah, i guess it depends on the benchmark in use.

I'm talking about standard memory benches. I used Sisoft Sandra, but the bandwidth benchmarks should all be very close, if not identical. Well, they're never identical, are they.

 
Intel's asymmetric dual channel is actually just a buzzword, it doesn't do you any good. In their newer chipsets, the key word to look for is flex mode. That will split the ram between dual and single