Is this true about RAM?

[Danklin]

I heard from my cousin the other day that if you put more than 3-4 GB of RAM in your pc, no matter if its 32 or 64 bit operating system, then you're wasting your money because Windows can not utilize any more than that. He says it's a ploy by manufacturers to get you to spend more money. I have 8GB in my system running Windows 7 64bit. Is it being wasted? Windows seems to utilize it when i check in task manager.

Mind you, this is coming from a guy that's a real Mac, Linux/Unix snob. He also says his Mac is way faster than my i7-2600k overclocked to 4.7. Not sure what his speed is

Any truth to any of this?

 

[nna2]

ahahah, your cousin is probably fooling with you

windows 7 can use up to 196GB of ram, even the most basic version of windows can utilize 16GB of ram
i used 4GB of memory, and my PC began to slow down when i was gaming, so i looked in task manager, and i was using up almost all my ram, with 8GB i don't see this slowdown

as for mac, they are exactly the same now, i would say somthing for powermac's, but now that there intel based (and now that PC's have UEFI)... there nothing more than over glorified PC's

 

[InvalidError]

32bits OS cannot use more than ~3.5GB RAM because devices reserve some memory ranges for memory-mapped IOs. This is true for ANY 32bits OS, be it Windows, OS/2, MacOS, Linux, BSD, etc.

Most 64bits OS will use whatever RAM you can throw at it except possibly for the lowest-end versions of Windows which may have a memory limit lower than the CPU's memory controller. For mainstream DDR3 platforms, that hardware limit is currently 32GB.

Win7 Home Basic has a 8GB limit, Home Premium has a 16GB limit and Pro/Ultimate has a 192GB limit.

 

[bigcyco1]

With 32bit he is correct but with 64 bit he totally wrong