4GB on 32b Vista - Anyway to see the overhead before buying?

[Hambone]

I hadn't even noticed memory prices were like 1/2 price since earlier in the year. My memory is crapping out on me (Crucial Ballistix DDR2-1000). It started a long time ago. I had to go down to 800Mhz and that's been fine for the last 3 months but now I'm seeing memory symptoms (crashes, BSOD's that say things like "memory pool"). I just upped the voltage a hair and put a crab cooler over the sticks to get me by until a mail order comes in.

I want to say Crucial sucks (again) but it's probably my fault as I went across the timing settings at 800 and 1000 when I first got the RAM to see what it would do - and pushed it to failure several times. I probably did some damage. I was suprised to see that even with a great overclock on the timings at most you squeeze maybe 8fps more out of something like the HL2 stress test. Now I'm of the opinon memory overclocking isn't even worth it... to much risk for such tiny gain potential.

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Anyway (OS question) - I'm not ready for Vista x64 yet but I might as well get 4GB now while it's so cheap.

I know I'd be looking only 2.5G - 3.5G getting used until I just to Vista. I haven't seen many games actually peak used RAM above 2.0G thouh so even another 500MB available would probably be enough for months...

I was just curious if there's anyway to see Vista's addressing overhead that comes off the top of the 4GB ahead of time. There has to be something that adds it up...

[Dragunov]

Well u can use 3.2 ~ 3.4 GB of the RAM. It's a limit of 32bit OSs

[$n][pErMan]

I have 4gigs in my machine now... Vista 32-bit reads it as 2.93GB... runs great and does make some difference believe it or not. Vista itself seems smoother and it seems to really have smoothed out FSX too. Plus this way when I try out 64bit Vista I will be ready :)

[Amuro]

Video card memory and all system devices consume part of the 4GB address space, so how much RAM you see under a 32bit OS depends on how many devices you have in you system, and how many video RAM you have. For me with 2 768MB video card SLI, I'd definitely see less than 2.5GB.

[Hambone]

I've tried looking around and I can't find anything. It really isn't a big thing at all but it seems like someone somewhere would have made a simple tool to show you what the addressing overhead is on your PC. The information has to be just sitting there. A simple tool to say "2.6GB is the maximum this system will have available with current devices (overhead)".

I found this nice article while browsing around. It actually says the max potential of Vista is 3.2GB (hard limited) - I've read the range can go up to 3.5GB so I guess that was faulty info.

http://www.dansdata.com/askdan00015.htm

[Dr.Nick]

I just upgraded to 4GB and ran into this issue on Vista 32bit. My bios only read 3008MB and I had 3007MB usable in windows.
I then found a memory remap option in my bios and once enabled the bios picked up all 4GB, but windows only had 2GB:confused: In the end I ended up doing a clean install of the 64bit version and with the remap option I have full use of my 4GB. Seems a lot snappier and it runs just as stable as my 32bit install

[Amuro]

I just put another 2GB into my system last night, and XP SP2 reads 2.75GB and 2.83GB in Vista Ultimate 32-bit.