4gigs in 9880

i think its ONLY 2.8gigs available to you, i read it in a thread here before, cant remember where tho..............

I have three gigs installed and indeed there appears to be 2.8 available.

I wondered that myself and could never find a solid answer, but it looks like any benefit you the user would notice is minimal at best; near non-existent in most cases.

It allocates those address spaces to hardware, not that memory. There's no performance advantage to having more than 2.6 GB of RAM.

:flame on: How can you not find the answer, it is stickied at the top of the forum for everyone to see, try looking next time :flame off: hehe

More details:

http://www.notebookforums.com/attach...achmentid=2912

I guess with the new Windows Longhorn or whatever its going to be called you'll be able to use 4 gigs

Only if your motherboard can address it!

NO! @R%@##@!!!


This is a hardware limitation NOT software. I repeat the D900T will not be able to ever use 4GB of memory!!!

So eventually we'll be able to address it with software right???



D&R

I'm gonna pretend I didn't hear that

Could you, like, revise the BIOS and stuff so that we could address like twenty gigs?

:cries: Nope

This is a limitation of the chipset. The chipset can only physically address 4 GBytes of memory. That is because it only has 32 "wires" to memory. Some of that physical address space must be reserved for various hardware devices such as the video card, etc and it is to my knowledge always reserved at the top of the address space. These various hardware devices do not actually use the physical memory - unless you have an integrated video card - but they use the address space and therefore it is not available to be used for the physical memory. The only way the 9880 would ever be able to address a full 4 GBytes of memory is by having an upgrade of the chipset. This could possibly happen if Clevo provided an upgrade to the motherboard which provided the Intel 955x chipset which has an 8 GByte address space because it has 33 "wires" to memory. Right now, I don't know of any reason to expect that Clevo will be offering such a motherboard upgrade to the 9880. The only reason I could imagine Clevo offering a motherboard upgrade for the 9880 is if they plan to support the Presler/Cedarmill processor from Intel that is supposed to be launched in the first quarter of 2006. I think they would only do that if they are sure that Intel has been successful in reducing the heat generated so that the Presler would be significantly cooler than the Smithfield dual core processor. However, I'm not real optimistic about that because my guess is that Clevo is waiting on the Conroe processor for its next Intel based DTR notebook. That I think is where the real future is for Intel but it won't be available until second half of 2006 based on all that I've read. So, if Clevo does not offer a motherboard upgrade, then the only way you could upgrade the chipset in the 9880 is to do it yourself assuming that it is even possible - I expect that means you would have to be a comptent motherboard engineer and electronic technician.

So, there you have it. Thanks to Intel, you can buy a 64 bit processor which can address 2**64 bytes of memory but because they limited the chipset to 4 GBytes of address space, you can't even use the full 4 GBytes of memory. That is also true of the new 945 chipset. Personally, I could easily use all the memory that I could put in a machine and so I am quite unhappy with this. But since I am neither a competent motherboard engineer or a compentent electronic technician, there is not much I can do about it. So, I sit and wait until Clevo or someone else produces a laptop which I can really get excited about spending $5000 on. The 8890 was the Clevo machine that I got excited about.

So, if you are really tempted to ask this question again, instead ask yourself if you can upgrade the motherboard or the chipset. If your answer is no then forget about addressing a full 4 GBytes of memory or more.

Oh, I forgot. If you could figure out how to "add" a 33rd "wire" to the chipset, then you would be cooking with gas :-). Not likely with the 915 chipset since the 925 is also limited to a 4 GByte address space. Might be possible with the 945 since the 945 might be the same as the 955 but without everything activated. I remember hearing about people activating PAT on Intel chips that were not supposed to have this capability. But then this is all wild and truly irrelevant speculation.

BTW, the last two posts were for those who don't just want to take no for an answer but would like to perhaps understand why the answer is no and under what conditions the answer is no. For this particular issue, the answer is no unless you can replace the motherboard yourself with one that has a chipset with a larger address space or unless Clevo comes along and offers an appropriate motherboard upgrade.

I was just poking at Luke's festering wound. I already understand the problem.