it will vary from PC to PC as the total amount of ram will differe i.e. you may be running a 1gb card i might be running a 32gb card i will most likely see more ram than you.
If you are going to run a 32bit OS then you will not have full efficient use of any system ram that exceeds 3GB. You will also be limited to 4GB total system ram. Most people think that you cant use more than 3GB because XP and Vista dont report the entire 4GB if thats what you have installed. Thats incorrect. The OS does NOT limit you to the ammount of system ram reported. It just means the OS itself will not take full advantage of the rest of the ram. More or less this means that the 32bit OS will have a larger memory foot print when the pagefile is taken into account. Not by any means enough to not consider 4GB of ram. Any program (take photoshop as an example), can use the full 4GB if it's designed to. Thats where the real problem is. Most software does not take advantage of more than 2GB ram at most. That goes double for most PC games. Right off the top of my head, Crysis and Supreme Commander are the only two PC games that I can think of that will use more than 2GB of ram on a 32bit OS. Even then there is a limit to how efficiently they use it. For example, Supreme Commander shows no improvement when using 3GB vs 4GB. It does however have a notciable improvement between 2GB and 3GB.
So if you happen to find a really decent deal on a set of matched/paired, 2GB x 2 sticks then go for it. However, more often than not you will find better deals on higher quality 1GB x 2 sets that let you tweak your system (eg Overclocking) better than 4GB sets. The main thing to consider is this. Is your rig mainly a game box or a general purpose box. If it's for games mainly then you can get away with the 2GB sets and be fine. If it's general purpose use box like a media box used for video ripping/converting/editing or file server use with lots of compression being used then you will find the extra ram that 4GB gives is well worth it.
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