You need to understand what you read. Yes, I am aware of the 32bit limitations. I was referring to the comment about video cards. Your video card is insignificant when your system displays how much physical ram is installed.
My comment was about how much of the 4GB is shown to exist in a 32bit environment.
hercule5
Sorry but you're wrong. Maximum addressable memory = 2 to the power of 32 = 4294967296 = 4GB. The available memory address are not only taken up by the system memory, but also devices like GPU's share the available memory addresses.
Microsoft Website explanantion
Microsoft Windows XP Professional, designed as a 32-bit OS, supports an address range of up to 4 GB for virtual memory addresses and up to 4 GB for physical memory addresses. Because the physical memory addresses are sub-divided to manage both the computer's PCI memory address range (also known as MMIO) and RAM, the amount of available RAM is always less than 4 GB.
The PCI memory addresses starting down from 4 GB are used for things like the BIOS, IO cards, networking, PCI hubs, bus bridges, PCI-Express, and video/graphics cards. The BIOS takes up about 512 KB starting from the very top address. Then each of the other items mentioned are allocated address ranges below the BIOS range. The largest block of addresses is allocated for today's high performance graphics cards which need addresses for at least the amount of memory on the graphics card. The net result is that a high performance x86-based computer may allocate 512 MB to more than 1 GB for the PCI memory address range before any RAM (physical user memory) addresses are allocated.
RAM starts from address 0. The BIOS allocates RAM from 0 up to the bottom of the PCI memory addresses mentioned above, typically limiting available RAM to between 3 GB and 3.4 GB.
;) OWNED
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