4GB RAM + 2GB 4870x2 + Windows XP 32 Bit

As far as I know...
With a 32 bit system 2^32 btyes of memory can be addressed by the processor (= 4 gigabytes)
Now that bandwidth is addressed to the system components first and the RAM last, so effectivly you'll only have 2 gigs of RAM available for your pc.
You'll need to upgrade to a 64 bit OS if you want the full 4 gigs to be addressed

na windows 32 will see 3.25 i run 4gig with 32bit windows know problem and if ur going to go with windows64 make it xp64 and not vista64

Would Physical Address Extension (PAE) do anything to help the situation?

apart having to put shortcuts for the games you install on the desktop and the drm vista is the dead os not xp64 Microsoft has even admitted it

The percent of Vista systems that are 64bit vs 32bit has tripled in the last 3 months. http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/ [...] today.aspx

Gateway's fall lineup is entirely 64 bit vista. http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-9981043-1.html

Hemi, with the os that you have 32bit what you see is what you get.

Yes but they didn't tell you that they only sold ten copies in the same time period

I think that it will leave you with 2Gb.

It should only use 1 gig of address space, unless the card truly does share memory completely.

no issues i just think when you install a game it should show up in the start menu

vista is for noobs

As much as people like to complain, Vista really isn't slow (unless you're trying to run it on a min spec system). It is actually quite fast on ,my laptop, and when I dual booted for a while initially, it actually ran faster than XP did on the same machine.

Anyone still paying attention to this thread? It has been some time since i upgraded and I am feeling like a fossil, so I was wondering if anyone could help me sort something out.

I have Win XP32 (MCE), I just upgraded to 4gb RAM (too cheap to just go to 3gb) and I was gifted with a 4870x2 by an associate(!). Currently, windows is showing 3.25gb of memory in system properties and dxdiag, and showing 1gb video memory (the card has two gb).

Now, I understand XP32 is limited in the amount of memory it can address, and I believe I understand that since the video card is effectively two cards in one, it only needs to address the memory on the first card.

That all said, I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing a few tweaks or setting to make this setup run optimally. I'm considering springing for Vista, but I would prefer not to if at all possible. And this is by all accounts more graphics horsepower than I strictly need, so I'm not looking for fine tweaks to get an extra frame or two, I just want to make sure i don't need to set something in my Bios or anything that I am missing to get the whole setup to work optimally.

By the by, my 3dmark score, which I am not obsessed with, I was just playing, was surprisingly low. I want to make sure that I am not missing a switch I can flip to get things working better. I suspect that my little Pentium D 820 has officially become the bottleneck here.

Heck, while I am asking, does anyone want to advise what kind of performance increase I might see from dropping a pentium D 9xx in there? Will the smaller chip and the extra cache make much of a difference,let alone a bit extra core speed? (I know that it is simply way too much video card for the mobo, but I'm not ready to build a whole new system around it just yet, but I have seen the higher pentium D's for around $100, and if it will make a notable difference, I am willing to do that.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

I believe (and this has been difficult to confirm, so I could be wrong) that the best I can do processor-wise is about a D 960. The 945 chipset supports better but (I should have mentioned this), it's a Dell, and i have been led to believe that the Bios will not support anything higher. This has been ridiculously difficult to confirm so if anyone can correct that, I would be happy to hear it =)

The situation with the memory should "just work" though, right?

The D 960 gets me about another 400mhz processing and doubles the cache size... not bad, I'm just not sure if I should expect the difference to be noticeable.

This was the first pre-configured system I'd ever bought... did me well at the time, but I'm finally regretting it =/

Thanks for the response though... hadn't really considered OCing the processor...

Thanks! =)