There is 4 Gig Memory addressing limit in a 32bit OS. What makes up this memory limit? ?

Question

A fellow told me it's main memory plus the memory on your video card. For example, let's say you have 4 gigs on your MOBO and 1 gig on the video card. According to him, the OS wouldn't be able to use up the 4 gig on your MOBO. I always thought the limit applied to the main memory and had nothing to do with the ram on your video card.

Answer 1

Ram on you MOBO and ram on your Video card are separate doing a similar task but not.. the MOBO has a limit it should usually say how much.

Answer 2

Windows reserves ram that is used to run the sub systems which includes, but is not limited to, the video card:

http://onlinedictionary.datasegment.com/...

Answer 3

All 32-bit operating systems can only see 4 gigabytes because it's the largest binary value you can represent using 32 bits.

It's just math... 2^32 = 4,294,967,296  or 4 gigs.  To utilize memory beyond that you need a 64-bit operating system.

The issue of 32-bit Windows only being able to use roughly 3.3 of the 4 gb is a completely separate thing - that's because system hardware like the BIOS, video card, etc is mapped into address space in the last gigabyte.

Answer 4

the video and the main memory are separate and the limit applies to both the video and the main memory (you can have 4gig main and 4 gig video).