Look in the resource monitor...you can see exactly how your physical
memory is used...
Mine:
Available 5325MB
Cached 3731MB
Total 8190MB
Installed 8192MB
Then it shows another catagory referred to as "hardware reserved". On
my system this amount is 2MB. Look at the difference between total and
installed. 2MB.
There is further breakdown given but I'm too lazy to type all that...
But the fact is on a 64bit OS with the right CPU and chipset, you can
essentially use all that ram...with some exceptions, obviously. But more
physical RAM still means more available ram.
On 4/30/2010 4:49 PM, Bino Gopal wrote:
But from the MS article:
Note When the physical RAM that is installed on a computer equals the address
space that is supported by the chipset, the total system memory that is
available to the operating system is always less than the physical RAM that is
installed. For example, consider a computer that has an Intel 975X chipset that
supports 8 GB of address space. If you install 8 GB of RAM, the system memory
that is available to the operating system will be reduced by the PCI
configuration requirements. In this scenario, PCI configuration requirements
reduce the memory that is available to the operating system by an amount that
is between approximately 200 MB and approximately 1 GB. The reduction depends
on the configuration.
So doesn't that imply that based on the fact that I only have 4GB, I'll still
be short some memory, unlike what some others said? Or to put it another way,
like Gary said, what will the devices map into since they can't map to thin air
(and apparently they still need to map).
And to put a further point on it, since the video card is a MMIO (memory-mapped
I/O) device, I assume it'll take memory away from the max 4GB too. So the
moral of the story is that sure I can upgrade to 64-bit Win7, but if I don't
put more than 4GB of memory in the system, I should end up with exactly the
same amount of memory as with 32-bit Win7 right?!
Now, apps running faster is a whole 'nother reason and definitely worth doing
it for that! ;)
BINO
From: bh...@sc.rr.com
To: hardware@hardwaregroup.com
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2010 22:32:12 -0400
Subject: Re: [H] Win7 Ent 32-bit vs 64-bit?
It maps into the address space of whatever the 64-bit address space is (8
terabytes or something like that). When you have a 32-bit OS, the address
space is only 4GB, the system maps in the hardware memory (BIOS, graphics
card RAM, etc.) space from the top of the address space down. That is why
you get between about 3-3.5GB of actual RAM when you have 4GB RAM on a
32-bit system. I know I'm not explaining this well, so take a look here:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/03/dude-wheres-my-4-gigabytes-of-ram.h
tml
and
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929605
Bobby
-----Original Message-----
From: hardware-boun...@hardwaregroup.com
[mailto:hardware-boun...@hardwaregroup.com] On Behalf Of Gary VanderMolen
Sent: Thursday, April 29, 2010 9:09 PM
To: hardware@hardwaregroup.com
Subject: Re: [H] Win7 Ent 32-bit vs 64-bit?
So what will they map into instead? As far as I know, the video has to map
into RAM,
regardless if the OS is 32-bit or 64-bit.
Gary VanderMolen, Microsoft MVP (Mail)
-----Original Message-----
From: Bobby Heid
IIRC, the BIOS and video RAM will not have to map into the 4GB address space
(in 64-bit). He will have the whole address space for RAM.
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