I'm thinking over some future upgrade options (not all that seriously, and I probably won't actually do an upgrade for a while )

 

 

I have an X-58 motherboard with 6gb of fairly fast memory, or at least it was when I bought it. Now I'm thinking about upgrading the graphics card. What if I get a card with 4 gb? Is this memory allocated on a need basis, or does it automatically reserve all 4 gb for the graphics? I'm worried that if I don't add more memory in, then the 4gb for the card will crowd everything else out including FSX. Is this fear unfounded? I would want this new graphics card to either support 3 monitors in surround mode or else one of those ones with gigantic definition, so the memory usage will be signifigant.

 

A related question, and I'm sure an extremly ignorant one, is when running a 32 bit application with a max of 4gb memory space, on a 64 bit OS, does the video mem come out of that 4GB portion only, or is it possible for the card to utilize memory outside of the space of the application using it?

 

The reason I'm hesitant to just add in 6 more gigabytes is that I have a kind of SuperTalent memory that was very difficult to

get a couple years ago, and impossible to find now. I'm not sure I want to play around with mixing and matching different sticks, so I would have to purchase a whole new 12 gigs, and since I'm happy with the speed and latency of my current memory, I would really rather save the money unless absolutely necessary to accomodate a 4gb gpu.

Moderators, please move this to the Video Card section. I mistakenly posted it here in the MOBO section

Firstly as you rightly say a 4GB card will only be useful if you have a large monitor or several monitors in your set up.

Whilst in a 32-bit OS the VRAM will have a significant impact on the Virtual address space, it is different and there is only a very minor impact in a 64-bit OS. Don't forget even running a 32-bit app like FSX the 64-bit OS has a VAS of up to 8 terabytes (FSX is still limited to 4GB) so the impact of the VRAM should be negligible. The VRAM allocation/usage will depend on the instructions sent from the cpu and the amount of screen real estate it has to fill plus the interaction with the cpu and the physical RAM, but with a powerful cpu the impact gain should be slight.

 

IMHO you should be using 2 x 4GB or 2 x 8GB sticks of fast matched RAM for optimal performance, in 2 RAM slots, 6GB may not be optimal in that mobo.

Regards

pH

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