Re: budget gaming hardware spec

2009/3/2 Daniel Pittman <[email protected]>:
> 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
[snip]

Unfortunately, confirmed by the very article you linked, no flavour of
WinXP-32 can address more than 4GB for the combined RAM/Video/
legacy space.  The /PAE switch does _almost_ nothing.

FTA:
"Windows XP (all versions)	4 GB of physical RAM*"
...
"* Total physical address space is limited to 4 GB on these versions
of Windows."
...
"Although support for PAE memory is typically associated with support
for more than 4 GB of RAM, PAE can be enabled on Windows XP SP2,
Windows Server 2003, and later 32-bit versions of Windows to support
hardware enforced Data Execution Prevention (DEP)."
...

Most consumer hardware seems to support PAE just fine these days.
AFAIK it is the Windows OS that is lacking the necessary support.
(e.g. check linux support)

That said, it can often be cheaper and easier to get 4GB RAM
(and let the extra go idle) than try to explicitly populate 3GB.

cheers,
Owen.
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