"Odie Ferrous" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> Tom Lake wrote:
>>
>> >> (I am also interested to hear about any other motherboards being
>> >> able to
>> >> use
>> >> 4 GB/4 memory sticks in practice !
)
>>
>> I have an MSI GNB Max with P4 3.06GHz and 4GB dual channel DDR RAM.
>
> Do you get the full 4GB in Windows?
>
> In my experience, there's no motherboard out there today designed for
> non-workstation chips (i.e. non-Xeon / Opteron) that works 100% - and I
> mean 100% - stable with more than 2GB of memory.
>
> The chipset design prevents the full 4GB being available, and populating
> all four memory slots generally takes the FSB down to 333MHz. Windows
> stability is also flaky.
I'm running 4GB with normal WXP, on the Asus SLI board being discussed.
You have to use the /3GB switch, to allocate 3GB to the user memory space,
otherwise Windows is only allocating 2GB, and reserving the rest for
system use, which is then rarely taken advantage of. The SLI, does
implement the extended addressing mode, allowing WXP, and latter OS's to
'see' 4GB (without this, the memory space used for things like the video
card, PCI devices etc., will be 'lost' from the available memory). It
works fine. There is a caveat, that a few applications don't like the /3GB
mode (only two that I have met so far, and both very old). I am running
with the memory at PC3200 (Samsung memory). There was a change a little
while ago, in either the board, processor, or the BIOS (can't now remember
which), which had a significant effect on stability when all four memory
slots are filled. A bit of research ought to find details of this, and
before this was implemented, earlier machines had to slow down the memory
bus, when they were fully populated like this.
Best Wishes