RAM upgrade for Gigabyte 965P-DS3 ?

[NuggyBuggy]

Can some kind soul recommend RAM to go with my existing system ?

My current rig has this motherboard runnng an E4300 (not over-clocked), and 2x1 GB of the Buffalo Firestix (Buffalo Firestix FSX800D2C-K2G PC2-6400 DDR2-800 CL5-5-5), in Dual Channel mode. I am not an overclocker and don't really know what all the specs mean. I only bought this RAM because it was on sale at the time and am really a newbie at matching RAM to systems.

Anyways I work with Vmware and am thinking I would like to get more RAM under the hood to give my virtual machines more room.

I'd like to add another 4 GB of RAM. Ideally I'd like to run dual channel but don't know whether doing so would require 2 more sticks of equivalent Firestix, if I could add 2 more sticks of any matched "dual-channel" RAM, or if it's even worth it at all.

If I had to add 2 more Firestix to run Dual-channel, this would be prohibitively expensive and I would just ditch that idea and get whatever works well enough with what I have now. I know that dual-channel doesn't net a huge gain, so would only pay a small premium to be able to do this.

I'm really looking for the sweet spot in terms of maximizing performance for my dollar. I see lots of name-brand 2x2GB sets with sexy-sounding names at ~ $100 at Canada Computers, would these work OK ?

Thanks in advance for any advice !

[willy]

Just curious ... What (host) OS are you running right now ? x64 ?

[NuggyBuggy]

Just curious ... What (host) OS are you running right now ? x64 ?
Plain old Windows XP Pro...hmmm just realized that XP might not be able to address 6 GB ? But if I bought the 64-bit XP, I'm guessing a lot of my other apps (e.g. games) might not work, and/or I might have incompatibilities with some hardware ?

[BJC]

I have that motherboard and I just put these in about 2 weeks ago.

http://pcvonline.com/productDetails.aspx?id=5294
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=23483&vpn=ocz2vu8004gk&manufacture=ocz%20technology#CustomerReviews

They are running fine at 667 but I was having some crashes at 800 even though they are rated at both speeds (I did up the voltage as you are supposed to). Vista32 only sees 3326 Megs for me

[NuggyBuggy]

Thanks guys.... hmm.. a quick search (never even bothered to think about this) reveals that under XP Pro "The virtual address space of processes and applications is still limited to 2 GB". It seems there is a switch to enable up to 3GB, but the application has to be 3GB-aware and I'm not sure whether VMware is or not.

This thread (http://www.howtofixcomputers.com/bb/ftopic152252.html) has be wondering what all this means for Vmware... and whether or not I ought to take this to the Vmware forums.

[kitty]

Thanks guys.... hmm.. a quick search (never even bothered to think about this) reveals that under XP Pro "The virtual address space of processes and applications is still limited to 2 GB". It seems there is a switch to enable up to 3GB, but the application has to be 3GB-aware and I'm not sure whether VMware is or not.

This thread (http://www.howtofixcomputers.com/bb/ftopic152252.html) has be wondering what all this means for Vmware... and whether or not I ought to take this to the Vmware forums.

I'm sure this probably doesn't fit your plans, but what about running in 64-bit Vista, which can address 3+ GB and virtualizing your WinXP Pro?

[NuggyBuggy]

I'm sure this probably doesn't fit your plans, but what about running in 64-bit Vista, which can address 3+ GB and virtualizing your WinXP Pro?
The only reason I am running XP Pro as my host OS is for games... and Office (a bit) and Picasa (a lot). My system was built with game playing in mind as well as virtualization. I haven't looked into it seriously, but I'm guessing that most of my game-relevant hardware do not have 64-bit Vista drivers - will my games even work ?

I'd rather not have to virtualize XP for game playing. I admit I am also leery of Vista because of bad experiences with the desktop versions.

I could also go to some x64 Linux and host VMs there. Either way, if I went to a 64-bit OS I'd probably end up having to build a separate game machine.

[Amourek]

You should consider upgrading the processor as well. The E4xxx line lacks Intel's virtualization tech. As a consequence, your CPU is doing a lot more work when using virtualization.

[NuggyBuggy]

You should consider upgrading the processor as well. The E4xxx line lacks Intel's virtualization tech. As a consequence, your CPU is doing a lot more work when using virtualization.
OK, that's something I will look into. I never got the impression that my CPU was a bottleneck, but I know that I could definitely use more RAM whenever I need to run more VMs. Most of my work in my VMs is not CPU-bound.

I still need to figure out how much RAM VMware can use. The VMware documentation was not very useful in this regard. It says that you can allocate a maximum of 4GB to all VMs, but did not specify if this was for a 64-bit host only. The thread I posted above has some conflicting posts... one claimed that apps can use more than 4GB.... I'd be happy if I could allocate 2 GB of RAM to each of 2 VMs.

edit: 4GB total memory allocated is a WS 5.5 limitation. According to VMware documentation for WS 6, "the maximum amount of memory per virtual machine is 8GB". Again, however, they don't specify explicitly whether this is only for 64-bit hosts. Arggh.