Hey so I used the primitive family pc (since my laptop's charger was fried) and was wanting to upgrade its RAM which is 1gb and hurting me since i want to do prodcutive stuff in it for the meantime.


So I searched the net about the specs of the motherboard and the asus site said this about the memory:


2 x 240-pin DIMM sockets support max. 4GB DDR2 667/533/400 non-ECC unbuffered memory

I was wondering if it meant the maximum is 4gb(so two gb rams) or I could use two 4gb ram for the two slots. So yea simple question.

Depends on your operating system. A 32-bit system will never be able to use/address more than 3GB of RAM, you need a 64-bit OS to do that.

This OS mean everything not just hardware. So if your running a 32 bit 2 GB should  be good since there is no 1.5 GB of ram and having 2 GB and 1 GB sticks will be bad news since Latency will be off and timing and it will bottle neck your ram  AKA make it run like shit.

Also it good to use the same type of ram (like per made sets) since everything will be synced up. Just trying to say it's not good to mix match.

who uses 32 bit systems anymore????

jk i use XP on my laptop still

I didn't know 32bit has that limitation but I coul swear my laptop has 4gb but it was windows vista 32bit. can't check right now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_GB_barrier

it's possible you had a 64bit processor running a 32bit os, which would allow the extra gig to be addressable but not
"accessible".

On downside of using 64 bit OS  (sure this is true for windows 7) use a bit more ram just to let you know but nothing to cry home about.

I don't think so. I mean I don't see why it would. It reserves a good chunk for itself to use but that's mostly because it can, if you're running 64bit windows with 3gb ram I doubt you'd notice much of a difference.

It dose but I said "it's nothing to cry home about" Meaning it's not that much of a differents. it's a fact it dose

I'm still waiting for 128-bit to become the standard so I can do 10^439834948 fractal zooms in 0.3 seconds

I mean it's so negligible (like 100MB) it's not even worth mentioning. There's no reason to use a 64bit OS unless you're going to have more than 3GB ram, and at that point 100MB is nothing, it's beyond nothing and not even a consideration. You're right it technically uses more but it's not even worth thinking about.

 
Well, Windows 8 will be the last 32-bit operating system from Microsoft, so the question will be irrelevent soon.

sometimes the board chipsets aren't capable of having more than 4gb of ram it think so the limit may not just be of the software end