I've got a 975X mobo and 2 x 1gb pc6400 sticks. I'm thinking about adding another 2 1gb sticks, will this be ok? I mean are there any drawbacks using 4 sticks as opposed to just 2? Any advice appreciated, thanks.
If you have a 64 bit OS and cpu go ahead. For 32 bit, vista will recognize from 3.0 gb to 3.5 gb, and xp will only see 2 gb unless you add a line to the Boot.ini file, then it will see 3 gb.
The computer will see all 4GB in XP Pro or Vista 32 or 64, XP Home requires some tweaking to get more than to 2GB. The only reason you see less than 4 in ANY OS Is because the OS is using some of it to run so you never have 4 available (expected). There are no drawbacks, more memory helps a lot of things, especially in Vista which requires more, if you were to go from 2 to 3 performance would degrade because you wouldn't be able to use dual channel (half the bandwidth), but as long as you have 4 you're good, no worries
I have a 680i P5N32-E SLI running vista ultimate with 4gb of Kingston Hyper-X 800mhz. I have all the eye candy running and the dreamscenen content (you can have mpeg movies as your backgound, crashes sometimes). On idle I use around 22% (933mb) of the 4gb.
I can even boot 3 virtual machines (ubuntu, fedora, FBSD) inside vista and only use about 40% of the 4gb. I'd love to max the Asus board with 8gb, but thats going a little overboard.
The computer will see all 4GB in XP Pro or Vista 32 or 64, XP Home requires some tweaking to get more than to 2GB. The only reason you see less than 4 in ANY OS Is because the OS is using some of it to run so you never have 4 available (expected). There are no drawbacks, more memory helps a lot of things, especially in Vista which requires more, if you were to go from 2 to 3 performance would degrade because you wouldn't be able to use dual channel (half the bandwidth), but as long as you have 4 you're good, no worriesMarfoo
Im not sure that your XP Pro statement is 100% correct Ive never heard of that happening before and I have two 512mb sticks and I see all of it in my OS so I dunno what your going on about but for superchroniks question you either have the choice of moving to 64bit or run only 3ish gb of the 4gb under 32 bit
Feel free to prove me wrong though but thats true to my knowledge
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