What is the max ram on 32 bit os?

Question

I will almost guarantee your answers will be wrong, Especially if you say 4GB

Answer 1

You need 64 bit to read 8 gigs of RAM. Perhaps you should read the below articles first before buying more Ram.

Answer 2

about 3.5 GB is the most that most people will see utilized.



mine was/is 3.49gb



EDIT 5/2/09 "Ok the answer trully I Dont Know, But my puter has 2.6 ghz X2, 750 gig hd, 1.5 gb EMBEDDED video, and get this 8Gigs of ram! Oh yes its windows Vista 32 bit"



So you are wasting the other 4 gb memory sticks in your computer until you get a 64 bit OS.

Answer 3

Hate to disappoint you, but the maximum is 4 gigs. Do the math with 32 bit OS.

This is from MaximumPC web site:



The basics of memory addressing in XP or Vista 32-bit:

The total number of system address space happens to exactly equal the amount of address space needed by 4GB of physical memory.

However, onboard devices / resources (NB/SB chips, parallel/serial ports, NIC, etc.) also need address space, as do PCI/PCIe/AGP cards. Devices & resources are allocated address space from the top of the pool, down. This works out to (depending on the specific system) to (typically) 3.12~3.5GB worth of space left. 3.5 is a rare high number; some system configs put that number as low as 2.9GB.

And, the gotcha: onboard memory on a videocard also needs address space. This is also allocated from top-down, after system resources.

So: 4GB (equivalent) address space - resources = 3.12GB available - vidcard memory (lets say 256MB, unless he's got a 512MB frame buffer) = 2.87GB available space. Increase the frame buffer (or, especially, run SLI/Crossfire), and the number shrinks further. Sucks for the people with a pair of 768MB buffers, as they can't even address 2GB RAM.



The math: each bit of memory on that stick requires an address. 8 bits/byte, 1,024 bytes/KB, and so on.

But, so does each bit of memory on that videocard.

Available addresses:

32 bit = 34,359,738,368 addresses.

64 bit = 1,099,511,627,776 addresses.

Answer 4

The total is just over 3GB. The rest of the 4GB address space is used by the PCI bus, and DMA controllers.

Answer 5

You may physically have 8GB of RAM but your 32bit operating system will not be able to take advantage of anything more than ~3.5GB of RAM.



Yeah, its true that you can go way beyond the 4GB limit. 32bit windows servers use PAE and it allows them to address more than 4GB ram.

Answer 6

32-bit windows generally supports around 3.25 gb of ram

Answer 7

Without looking at any other answers, I would tell you that you are only limited by the amount of RAM that your motherboard will support.