vista 4gb limit (does video mem count against total?)

[mm07]

All,

Sorry to beat a dead horse. But I have a question.

I am running vista 32bit.
I have 2GB memory.

I have read that vista can only allocate 4gb of memory (or addresses).
AND that some of that is already taken up by the hardware addresses.
So if I add more memory, it might not even be fully seen by the OS, because some of those addresses are taken up by video cards, cd drive, etc....

Now I also have one of those new 8800gts video cards. It has something like 680mb video memory on it.

Questions are:
- Does the 680mb count towards my 4GB total? If so, then it would be quite a big waste to add another 2GB memory, wouldn't it?

- I have 2x1GB ddr2 memory, should I just add another 2x512MB chips and give me a total of 3GB? Or is that even a waste? As I've heard depending on the MOBO, some peoples 4gb shows up as 2.5gb.

And the reason I am so caught up in this is because I enjoyed quite a performance boost when I upgraded my old XP from 1GB to 2GB. So It stands to reason, since Vista is a little more of a resource hog, to get similar performance, I'd need to go over 2GB.

Opinions are welcome.

p.s. too late to upgrade, I bought vista 32 OEM... so I can't go 64bit
Thanks
-MIke

 

[Mondoman]

...
Now I also have one of those new 8800gts video cards. It has something like 680mb video memory on it.

Questions are:
- Does the 680mb count towards my 4GB total?

Almost certainly not.

 

[Heyyou27]

Only the 32-bit version of Vista suffers from the 4GB memory max, and no you videocard's memory does not play any part in the maximum amount of memory.

32-bit theoretical max = 2^32 = 4294967296 bytes
64-bit theoretical max = 2^64 = 18446744073709551616 bytes

 

[keith97]

I went from 2 to 4 gb (vista64) and it did improve response some-mainly at loading. I am using 1gb sitting idle at desktop. But I did take a cut from 900mhz to 735mhz on ram speed (think its a mb limitation).