I am building a new system and going to run vista ultimate on it. I know that to use the full 4 gigs vista 64 needs to be installed but if I run 32 will everything still run in dual channel? This would be 4x1gig. Also a side question is 64 worth installing yet since last I heard it had driver issues, but that was awhile ago.

Im using 4x1gigs with windows XP Pro 32bit.No problems at all.Vista 64 has a lot better driver support than XP Pro 64 did.Most people report very little problem with drivers now in vista 64

Tim - said:

if you run a single RAM stick it will only be in single channel, you will need 2 x 2GB to run in dual channel mode.

Tim - said:

unless you are going to get the 64bit version i would advise against migrating from XP to Vista. About all you will gain is DX10 and a bunch of bloat... not that you won't get bloat from Visa 64 but atleast you will be able to address the RAM to help negate its effects.

Well yeah dx10 is the main reason I want vista. Also I am going to have 4 sticks of 1gig so I was wondering since 32 doesnt use all 4 if that would mean one stick would be inactive or something and basicly would have 3 sticks and disable dual channel. I think I decided to install 64bit version anyway and since vista comes with both versions if I have any problems than I will go to 32bit. So the driver problems in the 64bit have been improved?

XP 32 bits does use ALL the 4G of RAM !

In fact, you could even set the 3G option in your boot.ini !!!

Penang Penang said:

Please state where you have obtained such bad info?

a 32bit system ccan only address up to 4GiB. This must include video memory, PCI ememory locations etc etc which generally leaves you with only 3GiB~ of memory locations availble for main memory address allocation.

Sure, you can enable the memory address extension (Physical Address Extension), but AFAIK this will hamper performance.

In this day and age, if you want 4GiB or more main memory, just use a 64bit OS.

I'd say you are fine with 4 GiB system memory on 32-bit. Any more than that and it is simply wasted unless you have a 64-bit OS. Vista is pretty much equally supported on 32-bit and 64-bit so it really doesn't matter which one you get. You are more likely to encounter issues if you are running XP x64 rather than plain XP; however, most issues can be avoided if you make sure drivers are available for everything prior to getting it. If all drivers are available to you, why not go 64-bit?