Xaero_toast
Limp Gawd
- Joined
- Dec 29, 2008
- Messages
- 393
My kids have laptops (so spoiled).
A week or so ago I threw together a couple desktops from salvage, for them to play with. Something I could put 3D cards in. Something to show them what real games look like. Q2, Q3A, UT, all the classics, as opposed to the minecrap they have today.
That was a pretty big hit. The fun part was building them entirely from salvage. I brought 19" flat panel monitors home from work. They were abandoned due to nonfunction. We soldered in replacement capacitors, and had nearly free monitors!
Anyway, the project was enough fun I decided it could stand a little expense, and for about $4, I got a pair of 64 bit capable Pentium4 630's coming from ebay.
The system I've been working on is a Dell Dimension 8400. It's got a 925x chipset, takes DDR2 RAM, and supports "4GB". It had a 32 bit OS on it until the 64 bit capable cpu came in (today). We installed the processor, and booted up to the memtest disk first. Memtest saw just over 3GB (3007MB?). Installing 64 bit Windows 7 shows the same thing.
I expected this behavior with the 32 bit processor, but not so much with the 64 bit. I think I've got the answer, but I'm just looking for someone to "check my work".
I think I'm running into a chipset limitation. I knew the chipset was limited to 4GB of ram (what the spec says), but I think what that actually means is the chipset was limited to 4GB *address space*, and the address space reserved by devices and graphics memory is therefore unavailable to use the RAM at that address, no?
For what they're going to use the machine for, it will be fine without the full 4GB anyway, but if there is something I could have done to get access to all of it, I'd like to know.
I suppose in this situation there's really no advantage to having a 64-bit OS, is there? Besides the fact that just sitting there idling, win7 uses an extra half gig of RAM in 64-bit form...
A week or so ago I threw together a couple desktops from salvage, for them to play with. Something I could put 3D cards in. Something to show them what real games look like. Q2, Q3A, UT, all the classics, as opposed to the minecrap they have today.
That was a pretty big hit. The fun part was building them entirely from salvage. I brought 19" flat panel monitors home from work. They were abandoned due to nonfunction. We soldered in replacement capacitors, and had nearly free monitors!
Anyway, the project was enough fun I decided it could stand a little expense, and for about $4, I got a pair of 64 bit capable Pentium4 630's coming from ebay.
The system I've been working on is a Dell Dimension 8400. It's got a 925x chipset, takes DDR2 RAM, and supports "4GB". It had a 32 bit OS on it until the 64 bit capable cpu came in (today). We installed the processor, and booted up to the memtest disk first. Memtest saw just over 3GB (3007MB?). Installing 64 bit Windows 7 shows the same thing.
I expected this behavior with the 32 bit processor, but not so much with the 64 bit. I think I've got the answer, but I'm just looking for someone to "check my work".
I think I'm running into a chipset limitation. I knew the chipset was limited to 4GB of ram (what the spec says), but I think what that actually means is the chipset was limited to 4GB *address space*, and the address space reserved by devices and graphics memory is therefore unavailable to use the RAM at that address, no?
For what they're going to use the machine for, it will be fine without the full 4GB anyway, but if there is something I could have done to get access to all of it, I'd like to know.
I suppose in this situation there's really no advantage to having a 64-bit OS, is there? Besides the fact that just sitting there idling, win7 uses an extra half gig of RAM in 64-bit form...