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64-bit RAM limitations

A

Azziro

Junior Member
I'm about to construct a new PC but I want to make sure of something before I do.
I'm using Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium, the supported RAM for this OS is 16GB. I plan on purchasing 16GB of RAM, although I will probably not need that amount for some time. I also have a Radeon HD 5870 with 1GB of Video RAM. I'm not really concerned with the possibility of my video card RAM taking away from my system RAM, because there will be so much system RAM anyway. So my question is; Will I still have full utilization of my video memory regardless of how much video RAM I have? In other words, will having my system RAM capped ever effect the use of my Video RAM? Thank you.
 
mv2devnull said:
Memory addressing is not an issue in a 64-bit system (within near future). 32 bits can address at most 4 GB, and that must cover both RAM and access to videocard&other devices.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit#Limitations_of_practical_processors

If Windows is limited to seeing 16 GB of RAM, that is a purely greedy license policy based "we won't let you use more unless you pay us more" issue. VideoRAM is not counted there.
Click to expand...

But video ram and other resources may indirectly count against it because of the hardware addresses required to use them. For the same reason you get <4G out of 32-bit windows when 4G is the hard limit. If MS wanted to let you use all 4G they could do so with PAE, but they don't in order to protect you from "bad" drivers.
 
I use Windows 7 x64 Home Premium and I have a 1GB video card with 16GB of RAM. All 16GB show up in Windows, and Resource monitor shows it all as either in use or available, so none is being arbitrarily restricted for the video card.

In resource monitor, my breakdown shows 16,384MB of RAM installed, 2,663MB in use, 83MB reserved for hardware and 13,638MB available.

One really nice thing about this is that my system essentially never hits the page file. I'm currently showing 0 hard faults, which is the number of times it has to hit the disk for ram usage. 🙂
 
Last edited:
Jman13 said:
I use Windows 7 x64 Home Premium and I have a 1GB video card with 16GB of RAM. All 16GB show up in Windows, and Resource monitor shows it all as either in use or available, so none is being arbitrarily restricted for the video card.

In resource monitor, my breakdown shows 16,384MB of RAM installed, 2,663MB in use, 83MB reserved for hardware and 13,638MB available.

One really nice thing about this is that my system essentially never hits the page file. I'm currently showing 0 hard faults, which is the number of times it has to hit the disk for ram usage. 🙂
Click to expand...

You mean in the hard faults/sec column? That's a running number for each process and a hard fault is for any I/O, not just the pagefile. If you read a file into memory all of that I/O is done via page faults.
 
Jman13 said:
I use Windows 7 x64 Home Premium and I have a 1GB video card with 16GB of RAM. All 16GB show up in Windows, and Resource monitor shows it all as either in use or available, so none is being arbitrarily restricted for the video card.

In resource monitor, my breakdown shows 16,384MB of RAM installed, 2,663MB in use, 83MB reserved for hardware and 13,638MB available.

One really nice thing about this is that my system essentially never hits the page file. I'm currently showing 0 hard faults, which is the number of times it has to hit the disk for ram usage. 🙂
Click to expand...

Same here. I have two GTX460 1GB cards, and 4x4GB DDR3-1600 (running at 13xx), in an ASRock 990FX Extreme4 with a X6 1045T CPU.
 
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