[olug] Advice on a new rig

[T. J. Brumfield]

The limit is 4 gigs of addressable space, but your video card memory
and other factors eat into this.

I had XP on my dual-boot box, but as soon as I upgraded to 4 gigs of
memory I changed that to XP Pro x64.  XP saw 3.4 gigs of my 4 gigs of
memory.

-- T. J.

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 3:04 PM, Adam Lassek <adam at doubleprime.net> wrote:
> The 32-bit memory limit is 4GB, but only 3GB of that can be used. I ran into
> this after upgrading my machine, linux can only see 3 while Windows supports
> all 4 but with PAE.
>
> On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 9:19 AM, Obi-Wan <obiwan at jedi.com> wrote:
>
>> > For some perspective, my newest machine is an Athlon64 3200+.
>> > I do not yet see a need for upgrading, myself.
>>
>> My new machine (February) is an Athlon 64x2 5000+.  I don't game, but I
>> do a fair bit of batched, multi-threaded photo editing, which means I
>> frequently peg both cores for many minutes at a time.  MRTG reports
>> that from 10pm-12:30am last night, my *AVERAGE* CPU utilization for the
>> entire 2.5 hours was 85%.  It hovers around 20% when I'm not sitting at
>> the console.  I need to look into overclocking.  If hardware failure
>> hadn't forced my time table, I'd have waited for AMD's phenom problems
>> to settle down so I could have gotten a quad core CPU.
>>
>> >> I can likely get 8 gigs of DDR2 for less money than 4 gigs of DDR3. More
>> >> memory is USUALLY the better way to go, but I don't really ever run out
>> of
>> >> memory with 4 gigs on my current rig.
>> >
>> > I used to swap pretty hard even with 3 GB RAM. I don't anymore, probably
>> at
>> > least in part due to KDE 4 being lighter than 3. So on the KDE/Linux
>> side,
>> > memory use would appear to actually be decreasing over time.
>> >
>> > 3 GB is also the top limit for 32-bit x86 without some weird stuff.
>>
>> I run 4GB of DDR2 with a 32-bit kernel, and I've never had any problems.
>> Going beyond 4GB (not 3GB) requires 64-bit or hugemem kernel support.
>> With 4GB, I page only occasionally -- usually during the aforementioned
>> photo editing sessions.  The rest of the time, my RAM is all used for
>> filesystem cache, since I do run a number of web & mail servers off
>> this box.
>>
>> For me, memory speed isn't a big deal, but gamers may feel differently.
>> For average applications, I don't think there's much point in getting
>> uber-fast RAM unless you're also getting an uber-fast CPU.
>>
>> >> For motherboard chipsets, I have used NForce chipsets for years with no
>> >> complaints, but I'm open to moving to a different chipset in the future.
>>  I
>> >> need good Linux drivers (including the on-board sound to pump out HD
>> audio).
>> >
>> > I've always used VIA chipsets and never had to worry about it.
>>
>> When I was specing out my new box, several people on this list advised
>> that I avoid VIA chipsets.  I went with nForce and have no complaints.
>> All the on-board stuff worked perfectly.
>>
>> --
>> Ben "Obi-Wan" Hollingsworth                             obiwan at jedi.com
>>   The stuff of earth competes for the allegiance I owe only to the
>>     Giver of all good things, so if I stand, let me stand on the
>>       promise that You will pull me through.  -- Rich Mullins
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