RAM limitations

[Kevyn]

Hey guys and gals,

I have an issue that maybe someone can help me with. I am running a custom built PC for use with Pro Tools 7.3 and I currently have 3gigs of RAM installed (2-1GB & 2-512MB sticks) I want to max out at 4gigs which my motherboard supports but because I run Windows XP they say that my system will only acknowledge 3.5 - 3.8gigs.

My question is as such, if I do max out my RAM will my system still be able to utilize all 4 gigs of RAM even though Windows will only see about 3.5-3.8 of it?

Also, I have noticed that Sweetwater is currently using newer Intel P35 chipsets in their new computers and I know prior to that they were using X975 chipsets. Is it safe to say that the X38 chipsets would work even though Digidesign doesn't currently support either P35 or X38 chipsets to work with PT?

I look forward to your input...
Thanks in advance,
Kev

[Justin]

Any 32-bit OS (XP or Vista) will only see 4GB of memory addresses, minus those in use by other parts of your system. This means things like video cards, drive cache, CPU cache. Generally it'll even out to about 3 to 3.5 GB of space left. That's all the RAM you can address. So even if you have 4 GB installed, only the 3.5 will be useable.

We've tested the P35 motherboards we're using and found them to be very stable for ProTools use. I don't want to go out on a limb and say all P35's are good for PT because there are tons of vendors using them on motherboards of various quality. We've just done a lot of testing to ensure that the motherboards we picked are stable before we put them into the new models.

[Kevyn]

Thank you for responding,

My PC has 6 Hard Drives (3-w/8mb cache and 3-w/16mb cache)
my cpu has a 1mb cache, and my video card has its own 256mb of ram so does that mean that if I max out my RAM I can expect to see about 3.8 gigs? or am I going about this all wrong?

Also I have another issue on my hands. I just learned that my motherboards BIOS is corrupt and so now I am in the market for a new one and I'm looking to step up to one of the 975X or P35 ASUS boards because I know it will work with ProTools (but I really wish I could run with either the 38x or Nvidia SLi 680 or 780i chipsets) so I guess my question is which would be better the 975X or the P35 chipset? either way I am sticking with Asus as far as brand name is concerned (my current soon to be replaced board was made by MSI using a 925xe chipset...never again):mad:

Anybody have any insight on this issue?

[dpd]

Anybody have any insight on this issue?

Here's (http://duc.digidesign.com/postlist.php?Cat=&Board=UBB32) a great place to get spun up on the latest for PT LE on the PC

check out the best desktop and quad-core threads.