Should I run 2xGF285 in sli on winXP 32-bit?

[MagicPants]

I'm having issues getting several games to work on my win7 64bit machine and am thinking of adding an another hard drive with winxp 32bit to for a dual boot to run these games.

I have an extra copy of winxp 32bit laying around, but not any 64 version.

Now I have 12 gigs of ram installed but if I use that in 32 bit it's going to go down to 4 gigs at most, which is fine...

However my two 1gig video cards (geforce 285s) will probably chop off another 2 gigs off the address space so I'll be down to 2 gigs, which is still fine, but I don't think going below 2 gigs would be a good idea.

Will I get 2 gigs out of winxp 32-bit with two 1 gig cards or will it be more like 1.25 - 1.5 gigs?

Does the second card in sli even take up more room in the address space?

 

[hallowed_dragon]

I'm having issues getting several games to work on my win7 64bit machine and am thinking of adding an another hard drive with winxp 32bit to for a dual boot to run these games.

I have an extra copy of winxp 32bit laying around, but not any 64 version.

Now I have 12 gigs of ram installed but if I use that in 32 bit it's going to go down to 4 gigs at most, which is fine...

However my two 1gig video cards (geforce 285s) will probably chop off another 2 gigs off the address space so I'll be down to 2 gigs, which is still fine, but I don't think going below 2 gigs would be a good idea.

Will I get 2 gigs out of winxp 32-bit with two 1 gig cards or will it be more like 1.25 - 1.5 gigs?

Does the second card in sli even take up more room in the address space?

First any 32bit OS will handle a max of 3.5 GB of memory. Substract the 2 cards and you end up with 1.5GB. The system will take 500 MB to run so you will have 1GB for games and programs. If you really think that losing 10GB of your RAM just to play some games is worth it then go ahead.
In my opinion you should troubleshoot the problems on Win7 before making extreme decisions.

 

[MagicPants]

Best answer selected by MagicPants.