Mr. E. Mann wrote:
Hi,

I'm planning on putting together an athlon 64 system when I get my tax
return and I'm looking for a good motherboard that will accept 3GB or ram
(or more). I know windows doesn't really allow a program to accessmore
than 2GB of ram, but I hear XP pro can access more with certain setup.
Either way, I use a program that will use all 2GB of ram allowed it, so
having 3GB will allow windows to load all of it's bloat outside of that
2GB program limit. Does that make any sense?

Ok, my real question... I have found motherboards that claim they alow 3GB
of ram, but I've also read that some will not allow you to actually use
3GB of ram? If they can't use 3GB of ram, why would they allow you to
install 3GB? This makes no sense to me.

If there are 3 slots for convenience, and each slot can address up to 1Gig
then the board will allow 3 Gig to be installed. It's possible that less
than that can be addressed in total due to limitations elsewhere... I was
under the impression that 32bit systems can address 2^32 bytes, or 4Gigs,
but that there is a reserved space above 3Gigs for mapping I/O... much like
the option in the BIOS for memory hole at 63-64Meg (the 16bit address space
limit).

What I am looking for is a board that supports the Athlon 64 3400, Sata,
onboard Lan, usb 2.0, Firewire, 6 channel sound, etc. Basically all the
bells and whistles. This whole 3GB thing has me a bit confused.

Thanks for any help. Hope this made sense.

Essentially if you want to use the advantages of a 64bit system capable of
addressing lots of RAM, you'll need an OS that is 64bit too, which
essentially leaves you with leaked test versions of the appropriate Windows
or any semi-recent distribution of Linux, for the moment, at least.

Ben
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