32 bit memory, graphics cards

[Khazrael]

Well, I finally got myself back up and running and 5 boxing last night after a good week of very educational hardware installations, hard drive formats, and re-installations. A couple of interesting things I'd like to note, and see if anyone has any comments why they seem to turn out this way.

First, let me preface the changes that I've made and the current system I'm running. I purchased two new hard drives (a couple of 250 gigs, nothing like your fancy raptors) to try and allow for separate installations and configuration in my wow clones. In addition, I grabbed another two gigs of ram for my machine. All in all, this should have left me with the following:

Dual boot (vista and xp, currently running under vista and rather enjoying it tbh)
Q6660 (I think thats right) Quad core 2.4 ghz
4 gigs of DDR2 RAM
3 Hard Drives (Seagates, 7200 RPM Sata, 1x 500 gig, 2x 250 gig for a total of 1tb goodness)
2x geforce 7600 gt
evga 6801 sli motherboard (currently not SLI as I have two monitors)
The aforementioned two monitors - Samsung 21 widescreen

Unfortunately, not all of this quite worked out. Upon attempting to install my additional 2 gigs of RAM I found that one of my slots had a bad connector piece, and outright fails. This is unfortunate, and my mobo is still under warranty but I'm not so sure i really want to be computerless for the duration it would take to send it in and get it replaced, etc. This should still leave me with 3 gigs of ram though.

After giving up on the 4th slot, I reluctantly installed my 3rd stick and left it at that. After booting up, I find that (both vista and xp) only register my system as having 2.74 gigs of ram. Now I know that 32 bit OS can't see the 4 gigs I was trying to install in the first place, but I always heard it was somewhere between 3-3.5 gigs that would be recognized. Is it possible that my OS actually utilizes the full 3, but it only registers the 2.74? Is that normal, or is there maybe something else bad that I've missed?

In addition, I had shelved my second graphics card while I was running XP in lieu of horizontal span for the fps increase (which works fantastic btw). I was always told that vista fixed this issue, so I assumed once I upgraded I could put my second graphics card back in for some extra vram and such, but after putting it back in my fps dropped to the floor. I checked my drivers and made sure they were the most recent on both of my display adapters. Does anyone know if this is maybe something with vista? Does having two graphics cards instead of one actually hurt me for some reason?

The main reason I ask is because, at least for the moment, I'm going to be sticking with the 1 machine 5 instances solution. I had thought about getting a 3rd monitor which would of course require 2 graphics cards for the output slots, but now I'm not sure how viable this is. Maybe it's just because my 7600 gt's aren't up to date enough to run in vista.

Regardless of the above issues, I'm up and running now pretty smooth as well. I'll have to try and get some screenshots of my set up to post in the screenshot forum.

Also, on a side note, for anyone interested in dual booting vista and xp. Maybe it's just the way I installed it, but they both tried to use the same boot drive and then try to use the same files. After installing xp it overwrote my vista boot files and i had to go through a whole lot of hell to get them resolved. Also borked my keyclone license key which resulted in me having to bug him a couple times more then I should have needed to.

[Shigan5]

Motherboards have a memory limit and they are anywhere from 4 to 16 gigs or so. Normally the 680i should support up to 8, but since you have one faulty slot, it could have spread slightly to your other slot and the slot isnt recognizing,utilizing all of the ram. The other thing is it could be a bad stick of ram. Alot of computer manufacturers boast 512mb of ram, but they use bad brands and you really only get around 490 or so. So one of your old sticks of ram might just be getting old or you got a bad stick in your new batch.

As for the FPS issues in vista, it has to deal with the workaround they have to getting dual-view to work. Its software based, meaning vista has to process the image and relay to the graphics card which screen its going to go on. What this means is that each frame is first processed by your processor to determine which monitor and then sent to your GPU. Thus causing the overhead. And we all know that software rendering is extremely slow.

As for the boot issue. You never want to have two OS's on the same harddrive UNLESS they are on seperate partitions. Otherwise you get boot issues.

[Khazrael]

As for the boot issue. You never want to have two OS's on the same harddrive UNLESS they are on seperate partitions. Otherwise you get boot issues.

Thanks for the reply Shigan. I learned this the hard way (not being a very hardware oriented guy, as I'm a programmer). In lieu of the knowledge required to do things properly, what I ended up doing was unhooking my other two drives, repairing vista to get the boot files on it fixed. Then unhooking it and hooking up another drive to put xp on.

It's very ghetto and hacked together, but it worked for my purposes. I don't get the dual boot menu so I have to actually go into the boot menu and pick the hard drive what i want to boot up is on.

[Shigan5]

There is another option, ive never tried it myself as i have no need for xp, but ive read alot of good things about it, but from how it sounds it could use alot of system resources.

The solution would be to run XP in a virtual machine. Instructions

All it is a piece of software that, in other words, runs a computer on your computer. So in essence your running two OS's at the same time on the same machine. But as i said this could potentially cause alot of system resources to be used, but I do not know as ive never test. Just pushing this out as an option. XP will use vista's drivers so it doesnt have to use its own.

[Chorizotarian]

The RAM shortfall might be because your mobo is mapping PCI devices to the same address space as one of your live sticks of RAM rather than the empty slot. You could probably fix it by replacing your 4 1 GB sticks with 2 2 GB sticks. You might also find something in the BIOS.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929605

I've had issues with running 5x copies of WoW over multiple GPUs as well, although I'm now doing pretty well as long as I stick to 2 monitors.
Adding 3rd video card = *worse* performance?

Some things that helped me:
Reducing latency
[Other] PowerShell script to create symbolically linked (mklink) copies of WoW
Performance Issue