Memory Argument with Windows/Mac

[Fox34]

Well as i write this I am at a LAN party and everyone here is sayin that the Powermac G5 supports upto like 8 Gigs of RAM, and windows will only do like 3. But no one can find a credible source, I was wondering if anyone of you could settle this.

[Grings]

32bit has a limitation of 4 gig max, though people have found windows unstable with this
vista and 64 bit processors can handle more

[Wile E]

Actually, 32bit XP, on average, usually only recognizes about 3GB of ram because it counts the pagefile as part of the ram. If you eliminated the pagefile, it would recognize all 4GB, but it doesn't tend to run too stable that way(trust me). 32bit Vista suffers the same fate, from what I've been told. 64bit versions don't have that limitation.

OS X easily recognizes 8GB of ram, I've seen it myself on my best friend's content creation machine, but I don't know if 8GB is the upper limit. I do know that OS X Server supports more than 8GB.

[Fox34]

Thanks for the reply's that basically ended the fight down here at the LAN party

[DanTheBanjoman]

It's just a limit of 32 bit addressing. PAE is one of the solutions. However 64 bit is the way it'll be in the future. 64bit allows 16 exabytes.
We shall be using that for many years to come. In comparison we went from 4MB to 4GB at first, that's 1000 times as much. Now we go from 4GB to 16EB which should keep you occupied for a long time :)

[Dippyskoodlez]

G5 is a 64bit CPU, running tiger, its 64 bit too, Ram is not a limitation.

However, for the Intel mac pro's PAE comes into play.

[Steevo]

As well as counting all the memory address space for PCI, ISA, and onboard RAM for video cards if it can be mapped to main memory. So any hardware that was made after PIO.


So more than 2.5Gb of RAM is useless if you have a 1Gb pagefile and 512MB video card. I believe PAE still takes another cycle to determine address and then yet another to access the address.



http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEdrv.mspx

[Dippyskoodlez]

As well as counting all the memory address space for PCI, ISA, and onboard RAM for video cards if it can be mapped to main memory. So any hardware that was made after PIO.


So more than 2.5Gb of RAM is useless if you have a 1Gb pagefile and 512MB video card. I believe PAE still takes another cycle to determine address and then yet another to access the address.



http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEdrv.mspx

Yes, PAE isnt exactly great, but we're talking about a G5 here, not the mac pro.'

G5 is totally different ;D

[Wile E]

MacPros are supposed to support more than 4GB as well. I haven't seen it myself to confirm, however.