No reason not to get 4gbs of ram. Ram is dirt freaking cheap now.

How many applications can use more than 2GB? Wouldn't he be better served using that extra money towards the graphics card?

QFT
The thing with ram is that, I can run a full virus sweep and play Oblivion, a Ram intensive game. Since its so cheap, just do it. And if for some reason he gets into hard core video encoding or something, BAM he's prepped.

If you want to go a little cheaper than the 8800GT, the 9600GT is also fantastic. If your budget can reach the 8800GT, then by all means grab it, but if you have to go a little cheaper, the 9600GT is no gimped card, it'll perform not far behind the 8800GT, especially at low/mid resolutions.

Fair enough... i just didn't think that people did stuff like that....

Yeah. I didn't think cartoons played on weekdays till I was 7. Oh naivety. That and conniving parents.

630 W power supply

Not naivety... but why would you run a virus scanner when the files you're scanning are potentially in use? Doesn't it mean that your scanner can't effectively clear any problems it finds if they're linked to the programme your using?

I never understood why people ran multiple system intensive programmes when they didn't have to. Scan when you're finished with the PC for example?

I do fine on my laptop with 512MB RAM running XP, 3-4 excel worksheets, 2 word docs, at least one instance of Origin graph programme, a couple of instances of firefox, a firewall, winamp and Eudora. There is no noticeable slowdown and i'm on a non-dual-core CPU.

Granted my desktop has 2GB for playing games but it runs vista and is fine for everything.

Maybe you just like overkill, as the only times you need >2GB RAM tends to be for graphics/sound programmes when editing large files...
I'd say that your ability to run both Oblivion and a virus scanner at the same time is more dependent on your CPU rather than your RAM: recommended Oblivion specs are 1 GB RAM.

[edit]Thinking about it, your HDD read/write speed/RPM is also very important when combining these two tasks since the scanner will limit the access to required files during loading of new areas for Oblivion.

First of all, I will not wait. I am an American. We are a brash and impatient bunch who demand performance, at the expense of the environment and everyone else. I really just forget to run sweeps sometimes and when I download 'priority' updates, I feel the need to throw in an extra scan before the nightly 4AM auto one.

With Vista and rapid-get or whatever they call that footprint hog it preloads objects into RAM for future use. With Oblivion and 4gbs, Vista essentially preloads the whole shebangabang into the RAM and makes load times nada.

This turns me on to my third and final point. Its a market based desicion. Ram is simply at a price where buying 2gbs when 4 gbs is about 30-60 dollars more doesn't make sense. I can buy more RAM, and still meet the rational assumption of consumer theory while maintaining higher utility (as long as the compliment good of the motherboard can handle it). Because of this market drive towards increased RAM in systems, developers will naturally start taking advantage of it with SMP programs and the like.

Here's the card I'm looking at. It had a lot of good reviews, and is right at the upper bound of my price range.

Any thoughts before I click "zap the money from my credit card"

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150252

I use a Mac... I'll let you all cringe now.

It's got 3GB of RAM and I'd love to give it more (can't address more than 3, sadly) and it happily uses that. I point out that anyone who uses any virtualisation programs require as much RAM as they can fit in their machine.

Money zapped. Hopefully by this weekend I'll have a new card and some more RAM.

XP and 32-bit Vista have a hard limit of a total of 4gb address space, period. This isn't necessary; either could easily support 64 gigs, but Microsoft intentionally crippled them. They claim it's because of driver problems (many drivers assume that they'll be loaded in 32-bit DMA space, for instance), but it's my belief that this is mostly for product differentiation. I also suspect this may be to force people to buy Vista again when they go to 64-bit. All Vista drivers had to be redone anyway, so limiting 32-bit Vista to 4 gigs of RAM is simply raping customers that didn't think ahead or can't take the decreased temporary stability of 64-bit mode. It looks to me like they'll be forced to junk their $350 32-bit copies in a couple of years, even if they bought them retail, and start over. If this is true -- if the 32-bit keys can't be used for 64-bit mode -- then Microsoft has just bent the computing public forward over the bar and gotten the broomstick out. No kiss, no lube.

Server2K3 doesn't have PAE mode nerfed, and can thus support 64 gigs, and most drivers seem to work pretty well with it. The X-Fi didn't like a big memory system, but my Turtle Beach Audio Advantage USB card and ATI x1900 worked great in Server2k3 in the Mac Pro, until the x1900 melted. Of course, Server2k3 is expensive as hell.

Because of the memory addressing limits, typically you'll get about 3gb usable of 4gb of RAM; the rest is used for PCI address space and the memory that's on your video card. (which is generally flat-mapped into main RAM.) The newest chipsets have a couple of games they play to try to get a full 4gb of RAM running at the same time as the rest of the hardware, but I'm unclear on what exactly they're doing.

My motherboard is extra weird, in that it maps all of the RAM into the lower 4gb, and then the PCI address space too, hiding one gig before XP even starts. It has the option of moving the PCI memory above 4gb, which seems stupid and backwards to me... move the RAM, you dorks, not the PCI space. If you're running a 64-bit OS, that option will allow the full 4gb; otherwise, you get three no matter what OS you're running.

OK, so you just made this nOOb's brain hurt, a lot. Here's my question in response to your post. I have 32 bit vista, so will I be hurting anything by installing 4gig of RAM? What I think I got from your post was that windows wouldn't mind the extra RAM being there, it would simply ignore it and not take advantage of the extra memory. Is this correct?

I wondered how it effected dual channel, Bingo. Thanks Legion.