Computer died, and tells me "System Failed CPU Test"

[Tom]

As for 3GB vs 4GB you can't utilize more than 3GB without installing a 64Bit OS. Xp 32bit will just waste the extra 1 GB.

Not true my friend, not true.  32bit limit is 4GB not 3GB.

Just to be overly picky, There is quite a bit of truth to what Lazy said, a 32bit machine can only address a total of 4GB of address space, inclusing mapped in memory from places like PCI, AGP and PCI-E cards. So any memory on cards will eat up memory in that 4GB address space, hiding some normally useable system ram. then you have an even tricker problem, The kernel needs a spearate protected address space from each app, so most times the best you get is a 1GB/3GB split, so in actuality, apps are limited to 3GB max, including mapped mem like GFX memory, and so is the kernel. And with 4GB of physical ram, a large portion of the kernel's physical ram will be used for a large set of page tables, to access all that ram, further reducing useable kernel memory space.

/end semi ot explanation

[Melbosa]

I love starting these discussions.  I was aware of that Tom, but wanted to see how far you guys really wanted to go on the conversation.  Exactly why I posted such a small rebuttle.

Difference also goes to OS, and how they handle memory addressing.  XP is somewhere between 3-3.5GB, but no one really can narrow down the hard line there.  Vista is closer to 4GB, given the parameters you explained, and the fact that Vista considers the video ram on a Video card to be part of addressible ram, and can combine them for that 4GB limit.

In theory though 32bit is upper limit 4GB.

But whether there is 3GB or 4GB the adapter cards memory, and kernel will still eat up a portion or hide a portion for itself.  At the cost level, I don't think the extra $40-$60 is that big a deal to augment even less than half of that 1GB (above 3GB) really being used by the system.

Benefits of this:
* As the achitecture gets better (hardware and software), the usuable 4GB memory becomes more available.
* With 4 sticks, you have a better redundancy should one die that does not hinder your system as much.
* Just sounds kewler - LOL.

Take my machine at home.  2x1GB HD 2900 in crossfire.  4GB of RAM.  XP OS.  Really I can only address 3.5GB to apps, windows, etc if I'm lucky, but I have pushed 3.2GB of used system RAM outside my HD 2900s.  So for the cost and the redundancy, I paid the extra.




But for Thorin, not sure he would need to go 4GB.  Again based on his needs or wants, everything is subjective until he narrows those down.

[Tom]

* As the achitecture gets better (hardware and software), the usuable 4GB memory becomes more available.

Mostly software. IA based chips have been able to address more than 4GB for ages. Up to 64GB infact. Some versions of the NT kernel can actually use that feature, but have disabled it in XP (and vista I hear) giving the old "compatibility" excuse. Heck they broke most drivers in Vista, they may as well have fully enabled PAE, and then they could have gloated about having great default ram support. The funny thing is PAE needs to be enabled just to turn on that special execute page bit in the page tables, so even XP turns it on for some processors, it just ignores the larger capabilities of the much larger PAE tables. Fun times.

[Mr. Analog]

In theory though 32bit is upper limit 4GB.

But it isn't for Windows XP.

[Melbosa]

LOL nice pic out of all I posted.  Hehe, you just repeated what I said in my post.

[Lazybones]

As for 3GB vs 4GB you can't utilize more than 3GB without installing a 64Bit OS. Xp 32bit will just waste the extra 1 GB.

Not true my friend, not true.  32bit limit is 4GB not 3GB.

All right, it can't use it out of the box, by default XP will only allocate 3.x GB to application OS use and the remaining .X GB will be wasted on kernel /driver space.  You can get around this in XP SP2 by using a flag in your boot INI of /3GB or /PAE (same goes for server 2003 which we do this on). However how well these options work on desktop systems is really questionable. I still stand by the statement that anything over 3GB on a desktop 32bit system is a waste.

As for my build, just like Melbosa it was just a test to see if you where getting a deal. I sacrificed quality parts for price in an attempt to meet or beat the future shop price. Since there was NO benefit to any of the hardware I selected for the same price we can determin that that the FS system is well priced.

[Melbosa]

Since there was NO benefit to any of the hardware I selected for the same price we can determin that that the FS system is well priced.

Or priced with Cheaper built stuff to get a higher system specs.  eMachines were terrible for that.  Caution I say.

[Mr. Analog]

LOL nice pic out of all I posted.  Hehe, you just repeated what I said in my post.

Well then why did you say:

Not true my friend, not true.  32bit limit is 4GB not 3GB.

When the context of Lazy's statement was clearly XP 32 bit edition.

As for 3GB vs 4GB you can't utilize more than 3GB without installing a 64Bit OS. Xp 32bit will just waste the extra 1 GB.

As a friend I have to say that it is ok to admit you were wrong or that you didn't see that part. You won't lose face with us.

[Mr. Analog]

Since there was NO benefit to any of the hardware I selected for the same price we can determin that that the FS system is well priced.

Or priced with Cheaper built stuff to get a higher system specs.  eMachines were terrible for that.  Caution I say.

Well, reputation aside, the thing you get with a package that you don't get with building your own is a support contract. Dell or HP or any number of vendors will gladly support your hardware if you are willing to pay a bit more. For someone like Thorin who may not want to self-diagnose problems or determine hardware compatibility issues going through a vendor that offers support will save him time.

Heck, we have one guy over here who bought a MemEx "package" computer with support and he's had 0 problems with it. For him that's way more valuable than saving a few hundred bucks.

[Melbosa]

MemEx does offer nice support on either prebuild bundles or your own system build.  I've had a couple client's custom built systems into them, and as long as you pay the $40 for them to put it together, they are more than happy to give you that warranty same as a Vendor.

[Melbosa]

LOL nice pic out of all I posted.  Hehe, you just repeated what I said in my post.

Well then why did you say:

Not true my friend, not true.  32bit limit is 4GB not 3GB.

When the context of Lazy's statement was clearly XP 32 bit edition.

As for 3GB vs 4GB you can't utilize more than 3GB without installing a 64Bit OS. Xp 32bit will just waste the extra 1 GB.

As a friend I have to say that it is ok to admit you were wrong or that you didn't see that part. You won't lose face with us.

Cause as with my post I don't believe anything over 3GB is a waste.  I see valid reasons for it.  And I was rebutting the first part of Lazy's sentence with my own.

As for 3GB vs 4GB you can't utilize more than 3GB without installing a 64Bit OS.

Not true my friend, not true.  32bit limit is 4GB not 3GB.

Matter of opinions at this point, and no worries.  I'm not completely wrong, I don't believe, but nor do I agree with Lazy's assessment either.  My opinion, and 32bit's limit is 4GB, whether (as has been described through this thread) it can be completely utilized by an OS or not.

[Cova]

All right, it can't use it out of the box, by default XP will only allocate 3.x GB to application OS use and the remaining .X GB will be wasted on kernel /driver space.

Uhh...., I think wasted is the wrong word there.  The kernel/drivers need RAM for your system to run, that RAM isn't wasted.  The only way a single app will ever get the entire physical memory of a box is if its an old DOS protected-mode app, that doesn't change if you have 4GB of ram or 512MB.

As for the max mem on a 32-bit system, its 4GB.  Simple math - 2^32 = 4 294 967 296.  No - you can't map it all to a single application (in fact, its hard to get even 3GB for a single app without PAE or x64, and I won't go into those here), but that doesn't mean it isn't being used for something - quite potentially something important at the kernel layer that would be taking RAM from your app's regardless of how much you have total.

Vista is closer to 4GB, given the parameters you explained, and the fact that Vista considers the video ram on a Video card to be part of addressible ram, and can combine them for that 4GB limit.

The fact that Vista includes all of video RAM in the 4GB address space that each app gets actually makes the problem WORSE on vista.  For example, if you have say 2GB of video RAM (1GB cards SLI'd) and 32-bit vista, then the maximum RAM any application could possibly use is only 2GB (actually slightly less, there's other overheads eating address space too).  It's actually quite common for Supreme Commander to crash on Vista-32 on systems with >=1GB video RAM due to running out of virtual address space - some other new memory-intensive games are starting to hit that problem too.

[Melbosa]

Vista is closer to 4GB, given the parameters you explained, and the fact that Vista considers the video ram on a Video card to be part of addressible ram, and can combine them for that 4GB limit.

The fact that Vista includes all of video RAM in the 4GB address space that each app gets actually makes the problem WORSE on vista.  For example, if you have say 2GB of video RAM (1GB cards SLI'd) and 32-bit vista, then the maximum RAM any application could possibly use is only 2GB (actually slightly less, there's other overheads eating address space too).  It's actually quite common for Supreme Commander to crash on Vista-32 on systems with >=1GB video RAM due to running out of virtual address space - some other new memory-intensive games are starting to hit that problem too.

That was what I was trying to say, sorry didn't come across that way.

[Thorin]

Thank you for taking the time to compare the FS system to a custom-built, Lazy.

In theory though 32bit is upper limit 4GB.
But whether there is 3GB or 4GB the adapter cards memory, and kernel will still eat up a portion or hide a portion for itself

Take my machine at home.  2x1GB HD 2900 in crossfire.  4GB of RAM.  XP OS.  Really I can only address 3.5GB to apps, windows, etc if I'm lucky, but I have pushed 3.2GB of used system RAM outside my HD 2900s.  So for the cost and the redundancy, I paid the extra.

So if XP can only address 4GB including the video card's RAM and the motherboard's RAM (and PCI devices and other devices on your system), and you have 2GB on your video cards and 4GB in your machine, doesn't that mean that your computer has 2GB of *completely* unaddressable and unusable RAM sitting in it?

The fact that Vista includes all of video RAM in the 4GB address space that each app gets actually makes the problem WORSE on vista.  For example, if you have say 2GB of video RAM (1GB cards SLI'd) and 32-bit vista, then the maximum RAM any application could possibly use is only 2GB (actually slightly less, there's other overheads eating address space too).  It's actually quite common for Supreme Commander to crash on Vista-32 on systems with >=1GB video RAM due to running out of virtual address space - some other new memory-intensive games are starting to hit that problem too.

Neither Vista nor XP give "4GB [of] address space [to] each app".  XP (if you're not using the 3GB or PAE switches) has 2GB of user-addressable address space that is split between applications.  It can split it 100% to one application and 0% to the rest, if it wants, which means an application *could* have exactly 2GB available.  Theoretically.  Real life tests show that scenario never happens.  If there is more than 2GB of physical RAM, XP will use the overage for non-user-addressable requirements (such as loading system resources), but there will still only be 2GB user-addressable space available to any single application.  However, because of the method of addressing (32-bit bus), the maximum amount of physical RAM that XP can use will be the lesser of your installed RAM or 4GB minus device addressing needs (Video RAM, PCI devices, etc).  Vista was supposed to remove the hard limit of 2GB per application by putting all the addressable memory into the user-addressable space, but in so doing caused application code and video code to fight over shared resources.

[Thorin]

In fact, here's a bit of a write-up about how Vista handles video memory

WDDM now allows for "virtualized" video memory. Virtualization abstracts video memory so that it is no longer necessary to think about creating a resource in either video or system memory. Just specify what the resource is going to be used for and the system will place the memory in the best place possible. Additionally, virtualization allows for the allocation of more memory than actually exists on the hardware. Memory is then paged into the correct hardware as needed.

The problem, of course, is that they didn't remember to make it automatically increase the amount of virtual memory space it was asking for.  Now throw in the fact that WDDM stores a copy of all of the data in memory on the graphics card in the virtual memory space, and you can see that the virtual memory space for the application is being eaten up rapidly with high-RAM video cards.  Vista does this for faster screen re-draws when an application has lost all of its graphical data, such as when alt+tabbing away and then back again.

Again, this just means that application code and video code now fights over a single pool of virtual memory space.  Now if only they had made the pools bigger than 2GB by default...  If I've read correctly, there's a way to set the limit for virtual memory address space per application in Vista, but I don't know where exactly.

All I know is I'd rather run XP because problems like this either don't exist or have been fixed.  I'm sure two or three years from now Vista will have tweaks in it that make sure the virtual memory space grows organically as needed.