Re: budget gaming hardware spec

Ben <[email protected]> writes:
> 2009/3/1 Voytek Eymont <[email protected]>:
>> is PCI E 16 what I need for video card ?
>
> Yep.
>
>> is there any benefit of more RAM than 2GB ?
>
> Not much.
>
> XP 32 can't use more than 3GB and can't allocate more than 2GB to a
> single process.

Neither of those is strictly true: XP-32 can address up to 4GB of
physical RAM; you get 4GB of RAM minus whatever your system board takes
for the PCI aperture, etc.  That varies, but is often less than 1GB,
with 256MB and 512MB being common enough.

With PAE support you can even use memory hoisted above the 4GB mark,
although this also requires hardware support, and most cheap desktop
boards *don't* support the requisite settings.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEdrv.mspx

Second, you can configure XP-32 to allocate 3GB for user-space, 1GB for
kernel, allowing individual applications access to up to 3GB of address
space.

> RAM is cheap though, so you could throw some more in if you feel like
> it.

This is generally good advice, though.

Regards,
        Daniel
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