AMD760-MPX chipset steals RAM??

[Neo35]

Greetings everyone... this is my first post so go easy on me...

I pulled up the S2466 Tyan page and saw the following under the system memory bullet...

Tiger MPX (S2466) Motherboard
System Memory
Four 184-pin 2.5v DDR DIMM sockets
Supports up to 4GB* of Registered PC2100 DDR memory
Supports ECC (72-bit) memory modules

* Note: The AMD-760 MPX requires a portion of memory to be reserved for PCI devices. Allocation for these devices is dependent on the number of PCI devices installed, and option ROM for each device. Common configurations will see 3.5GB to 3.8GB of available memory.

My question is... does the MPX chipset "steal" 200-500mb of your RAM for its own use?:Q

Neo35

 

[Demon-Xanth]

I believe the common configurations include RAID cards, Gbit ethernet cards, vidcards w/ a large AGP apature, and the like.

 

[Peter]

No ... it's simply that current CPUs and chipsets have a 32-bit total address space, which is 4 GB in size.

Now you need to have room for BIOS ROM, PCI and AGP devices, interrupt controllers, AGP aperture and other bits and pieces - you can't stuff the entire address space with RAM. So while technically you can plug 4 GB of RAM in, the chipset will have to hide part of it to keep the rest of the system accessible.

From lower RAM amounts, nothing will be missing.

regards, Peter