3dlabs Wildcat Realizm 500 + XP Pro 32 bit, 4GB RAM

[wheresmybacon]

One of the many groups of engineers I support just purchased 4 of these cards, knowing full well the manufacturer is no longer updating drivers as of about a year ago. Aparently it's one of few cards that will work with an Intergraph 3d application they use.

That said, of course a really odd problem pops up. In short, when their XP Pro 32-bit machines are paired with this Realizm card and 4GB system RAM, the machine freezes. Full GUI lock, hard boot required to bring it back. Removing one 2GB stick of memory (DDR2 667mhz DIMM) brings the system back to complete stability and all is well.

Using onboard video (Intel DQ965GF mobo) and 4GB is a breeze. Totally stable. Add the Realizm card, and of course you get a hard lock.

I know about 32-bit OS's not "seeing" the entire 4GB of RAM, but I haven't had any experience with it actually be a problem. Has anyone seen the extra RAM (> about 3GB) in a 32-bit OS actually be the cause of stability problems?

 

[nullpointerus]

No experience...but here are some possible workarounds:

- There is a boot.ini option to limit the memory Windows sees.
- There is a BIOS "memory remapping" option that will do something similar.

I suppose XP workstations pre-SP2 could be seeing the full 4 GB RAM through their PAE kernels. In this case, driver bugs regarding the limitations of 32-bit addressing could become apparent. Updating the workstations to SP2 should accomplish the same as the above. (MS changed the PAE kernel to make it less prone to driver bugs.)

 

[CrystalBay]

To tell you the truth you may have better results with your query at beyond 3D forums...

 

[kobymu]

There is a chance that your problem is a memory addressing problem, read: a 32bit OS can't handle more physical memory that it can address (4GB), and in some cases (maybe all, not sure), the video card memory will count to the total memory in you system that the OS needs to handle.

So yes, this *may* be an OS/addressing problem.

 

[rbV5]

Pull half of your ram and test it again.

 

[Denithor]

Since it hangs with 4GB and runs fine with 2GB it does appear to be a memory mapping conflict of some kind.

How do the systems run with 2GB memory? If performance is acceptable that way just pull the second 2GB sticks and you're done.

If the systems need more than 2GB memory, there are two other options I can think of:
1) Run 3GB memory and see what happens. If these are dual-channel systems use 2 x 1GB and 2 x 512MB to maintain performance.
2) Upgrade to XP-64 or Vista-64. Not really a good solution, as their specific software may not even run under a 64-bit system and you may not be able to find 64-bit drivers period for those video cards. But this would also give the benefit of truly using all that memory they've got installed.

 

[wheresmybacon]

I pulled the 2nd stick of RAM and the system runs rock solid. Totally stable. I actually did that yesterday and it's been up and working ever since.

I'm just going to set the memory aside and have these folks work with 2gb.

Thanks for your help, guys.