"What's with the 3Gb memory barrier"?

I wish someone would do some performance testing on ReadyBoost at various memory configs. I can easily seeing it making a significant difference for system memory of 512MB that MS recommends for Vista. . . but does it make much of a difference for 2GB systems? How about 4GB? 8GB?

I faced this decision when I ordered my Thinkpad. I got 2GB of RAM, but I had an option to also get built in 1GB of Robson. . .but to do so I would have had to give up some wwan capability. . . . and I decided to pass on Robson.
 
So having 3GB for Vista 32 would be great then?

I'm having trouble trying to word this question:
factoring in the 4GB overall limit, and the 2GB program limit, would having 3GB basically be 1024 for the O/S to load/startup, and the remaining 2048 for programs/games?

I have 2048MB now, and have seen all of it used already in a few games using WinXP. I have 1720MB available after a fresh startup. It seems 3 is the magic number...if my question above is true, is it? Especially since Vista will take even more at startup.
 
Geo said:
Oh, Doh! That was right above mine and I didn't see it. Yes, I will attest to that with 4GB of RAM and Vista 64-bit. As I did both at the same time, I wasn't entirely sure which to blame. Sounds like from yours it's the 4GB part, which seems awfully odd. But then Creative + awfully odd driver problem = par for the course. So, I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure when Creative will officially resolve this, but the modded YouP-Pax X-FI drivers fixes it, if you aren't opposed to modded drivers. DriverHeaven.net has them available. Also, the latest drivers from Creative supposedly fix this, but unfortunately, it fixed it for some people, and caused it for some people that previously never had it! :LOL:

My advice is to use the latest YouP drivers. Creative ought to hire them to write drivers (or stop doing so much crap in software and then disguising it as new products that have no further funtionality than old products other than their drivers!).

If the YouP drivers still don't help, then supposedly a BIOS update + the YouP drivers will correct it (particularly for 680i boards, but I didn't see what you had).
 
Geo said:
I wish someone would do some performance testing on ReadyBoost at various memory configs. I can easily seeing it making a significant difference for system memory of 512MB that MS recommends for Vista. . . but does it make much of a difference for 2GB systems? How about 4GB? 8GB?

I faced this decision when I ordered my Thinkpad. I got 2GB of RAM, but I had an option to also get built in 1GB of Robson. . .but to do so I would have had to give up some wwan capability. . . . and I decided to pass on Robson.
Click to expand...

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/543/1/

A review like that one? :D Bottom line, it helps for 512MB, does little to nothing with 1GB or more (and might actually begin to hamper).
 
To the two posters above me: I think you're confused.

Robson can be used as a ReadyBoost cache, but the real intention was for a ReadyBoot (notice the missing S?) cache. The difference is this: Readyboost does nothing for boot times, because it is not accessed until after the kernel is running in it's entirety.

ReadyBoot (without the S, again) is where Vista creates a boot partition within that flash disk that allows it to boot far-faster. Think hybrid hard drive, but now use a normal hard drive and flash media built into your system board instead.

Make more sense now? Robson is dual-purpose, in that it can be used as a ReadyBoot device, and then be re-used as a ReadyBoost cache while the OS is running, and then on shutdown be reconfigured for a ReadyBoot device again.
 
Albuquerque said:
To the two posters above me: I think you're confused.

Robson can be used as a ReadyBoost cache, but the real intention was for a ReadyBoot (notice the missing S?) cache. The difference is this: Readyboost does nothing for boot times, because it is not accessed until after the kernel is running in it's entirety.

ReadyBoot (without the S, again) is where Vista creates a boot partition within that flash disk that allows it to boot far-faster. Think hybrid hard drive, but now use a normal hard drive and flash media built into your system board instead.

Make more sense now? Robson is dual-purpose, in that it can be used as a ReadyBoot device, and then be re-used as a ReadyBoost cache while the OS is running, and then on shutdown be reconfigured for a ReadyBoot device again.
Click to expand...

Perhaps I am confused, since Robson is an Intel solution that takes advantage of the Windows technologies ReadyDrive and ReadyBoost. ... I'm confused as to why we are talking about robson when ReadyBoost, Vista and OS memory management was the topic! :LOL:

"Windows ReadyBoost on the other hand is designed to increase performance of systems that don't have much system memory but do have access to external flash based storage devices (e.g. USB drives). ReadyBoost will use these drives as additional virtual memory and swap to them when it runs out of main memory, which will obviously improve performance vs. simply going to disk."

Again, as expected, with 512MB of RAM, you get a performance increase. With 1GB and up, little to nothing and perhaps it might hamper performance.

Robson is interesting, but Vista "features" and Robson are neither mutually inclusive or exclusive. I would be delighted to hear more about your views about Intel robson as they pertain to the 3GB limit/Vista memory management, though! :D
 
It's been proven that he did say it, but most people forget that it wasn't Gates' design to limit us to 640k...

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/ram/logic.htm

IBM is who built in that limitation, and a ton of others, Gates was only commenting on it at the time. The 640k barrier on the x86 platform isn't specific to Microsoft OSes if you pay any attention...
 
caffeinated said:
Perhaps I am confused, since Robson is an Intel solution that takes advantage of the Windows technologies ReadyDrive and ReadyBoost. ... I'm confused as to why you are bringing this up as though Intel Robson was what we were discussing :LOL:
Click to expand...
Uh, we WERE talking about Robson features if you look up this thread a bit. Maybe you should follow along better? Geo wasn't helping with the confusion, but here's where it started:

Geo said:
I faced this decision when I ordered my Thinkpad. I got 2GB of RAM, but I had an option to also get built in 1GB of Robson. . .but to do so I would have had to give up some wwan capability. . . . and I decided to pass on Robson.
Click to expand...
Robson is what he was talking about, but he was confusing it's capabilities with only ReadyBoost. ReadyDrive and ReadyBoot are the same things, albeit with different names (MS has changed the name since Beta, so my bad :( )

Others came in with their reviews of ReadyBoost, which we already know doesn't help machines with enough memory. But Robson does more than just readyboost, which is why I posted what I did.

Get it now?
 
I somehow missed the last sentence of Geo's post which then made a reference to robson. The first part of the post indicated that he wanted clarification on how much ReadyBoost helped system performance. Obviously not everyone knows that it doesn't help, otherwise he wouldn't be asking, right? Or did I miss the FAQ topic that outlined "What everyone knows about Vista", too ? :LOL:
 
Yeah, and maybe you and he both missed the point where ReadyBoost isn't the only thing that Robson is good for? Aren't you glad I posted? ;)
 
Albuquerque said:
Yeah, and maybe you and he both missed the point where ReadyBoost isn't the only thing that Robson is good for? Aren't you glad I posted? ;)
Click to expand...

Since I didn't even see anything posted anywhere about robson until you brought it up in your post claiming that "I missed the point", and wasn't thinking about anything but OS address space, memory, and Vista (the topics of the thread), I didn't miss the point about anything to do with robson. I was discussing ReadyBoost, Vista, and Memory.

If *YOU* would like to continue on talking about robson, I'd be delighted, as I said, to hear your views about it, but I never mentioned it until you did, so there was no point that *I* was missing. That's my point. :LOL:
 
caffeinated said:
Since I didn't even see anything posted anywhere about robson until you brought it up in your post claiming that "I missed the point", and wasn't thinking about anything but OS address space, memory, and Vista (the topics of the thread), I didn't miss the point about anything to do with robson.
Click to expand...
Welp, then you missed it. Geo started the Robson conversation when he introduced his question about ReadyBoost. ReadyBoost is not the only use for Robson technology, it was in fact offered as a substitute to hybrid drive technology -- and gained ReadyBoost capability due to the way that Vista enumerates the storage type.

You're welcome.

Back to the OP -- we need 64-bit OSes sooner rather than later, unfortunately. This limit has been around for eons, not too much differently than the 640kb limitation created by IBM so long ago. Bleh...
 
I'm all for moving to 64-bit. The sucky part, though, is many of the applications and drivers aren't. I'm actually kind of surprised, though, that 32-bit has hung on as long as it has. Then again, until last year, even though 64-bit XP had been around for quite a while, you could practically count the number of applications and drivers that supported it fully with your fingers and toes.
 
caffeinated said:
I'm all for moving to 64-bit. The sucky part, though, is many of the applications and drivers aren't. I'm actually kind of surprised, though, that 32-bit has hung on as long as it has. Then again, until last year, even though 64-bit XP had been around for quite a while, you could practically count the number of applications and drivers that supported it fully with your fingers and toes.
Click to expand...

Yup, 100% agreed there. It still surprises me how very little 64-bit support there is out there, both in terms of apps and drivers. It's not just a Windows thing either; 64-bit anything was in pretty limited supply even at the beginning of '06.

Hopefully now that we're getting a more mainstream 64-bit OS (let's face it, XP64 wasn't a very big deal) then perhaps we'll see some good progress in the next 12 months.
 
Sorry to bump this thread again guys but im deliving into this subject myself at the moment and I have a question.

To all those using 64bit OS's and more than 3GB of RAM, are you seeing your total amount of physical RAM as being available or are you losing a GB were windows is reserving the 4th Gigabyte?

It seems the article at the start of this thread suggests the whole 4th Gigabyte is always reserved for device memory even on a 64bit system but others have suggested that this is not the case and that in fact the system will only reserve as much of that 4th Gigabyte as your system needs, i.e. 256MB + a little extra if you have a 256MB GPU but 768MB + a little extra if you have a 768MB GPU.

Can anyone confirm how much memory they are losing (if any) and what their GPU config is?

Cheers
 
On a 64-bit system you shouldn't lose any of your physical memory space to device memory. Device memory regions can be remapped outside of the 4GiB region there (unless your system BIOS is crap).

So you should see all available physical memory on a 64-bit OS.

8GiB here, 8GiB available, Vista x64, with 1GiB total of GPU memory (768 + 256).
 
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