I just built myself a major new box for my photo business:
Athlon 64 X2 6000!
4 GB RAM
dual Seagate 250 GB SATA 7200 drives
etc, etc.
Well, obviously, it also makes a great cruncher. So, I need someone else who runs an Athlon 64 X2 with Windoze XP 32 bit. That's so I get credit with that funny homogeneous redundancy thing they do. That's you, baby! You process mine and I'll process yours.
(OK, it's a wee bit more than I need for Photoshop, but hey... )
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What OS are you running with that machine? Only 64bit versions of Windows can handle all 4GB right?
I thought XP and Vista could handle 4Gb? Obviously they can address 4Gb in 32bit mode and I know '98 could only do 3Gb or so but I thought XP was fine..
Actually, it comes to ... hang on, I'll look ... 3.25 GB. Yep, I'd have to go to 64-bit to get the rest.
What it is, is that Photoshop CS3 will use up to 2GB. I never go THAT far, but sometimes when I'm merging 5 shots in a panorama, it goes right up. Also, it saves a ton of stuff in its History cache. With a couple of DC projects crunching in the background and RAM being pretty cheap these days, I figured I'd plug in the 4 gig and see how it went. Also, I may want to use some for a RAM-disk. Not sure about that yet.
If I really NEED all 4, I'll switch to XP-64. Damn, but it sure is fast!
No Vista for me!If there's anything I DON'T need, it's some dumb POS software asking me every two minutes if I'm Really, Really Sure that I want to do something! This box is fast enough to last me a while. If I ever outgrow it, I may switch to Apple just to avoid Vista.
HOME: A physical construct for keeping rain off your computers.
I think what would be really cool would be a huge box-like thing that basically was about 5 cases put together, made for being run from one point. It would be made to run on either Linux or Apple computers(definitely NOT Windows) and one computer(or core) would be in charge of sending work out. Each box would have a dedicated flash drive with just enough stuff on it to allow it to be a slave to the main cpu. You wouldn't necessarily be running the same project on each computer, but you'd be able to track things to see how they're progressing.Originally Posted by Paratima
No Vista for me!
Setting it up would be a bit of a hassle because you'd have to wade around in the installed programs directories to figure out what needed to be tracked, and there'd be a lot of forum and email in the name setting it up properly. But it would be magnificent.
.....
forget it
Nope. The OS reserves 1GB of address space (out of the 4GB of 32bit addressable space) for itself so with a hack you can get it to use 3.25GB I think but the rest is lost. Same with Vista, you need the 64bit version to fully use your 4GB of RAM.
ah, ok, well I don't have any windows boxen with more than 2Gb anyway
OK what if you made a bat file to make a 1 Gig RamDrive at Bootup
The maximum address space for 32bit computers is 4GB.
The top of the address space is used by the OS for mapping roms and video memory amongst other things.
How much of this address space is used depends on your hardware config.
A machine with no add on cards and basic video could have more than 3.5GB
available for mapping memory.
A maxed out gaming rig with a pair of 8800gtx's could have as little as 2GB.
Answer to this problem seems clear enough go 64bit but it isn't quite that simple.
The key here is compatability, would all your apps work on a 64bit OS ?
Got drivers for everything ? probably not.
During it's lifetime the PC has encountered many barriers all of them have been circumvented.
This is just another bump in the road.
Couple of years from now we will be all using 64bit OS's and the 4GB barrier will be a distant memory.
Of course we will have found another limitation that the early PC designers couldn't possibly have forseen.
640k it's all anyone would ever need.
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