Use of /3GB switch (XP Pro) killing 8800GT/175.19 Driver?!

[jeeka]

Hey guys,
Anyone else have this problem? System was fresh from a reformat, wanted to use the /3GB switch to allow Photoshop and After Effects access to more than 2GB of RAM at a time and upon restart, the Windows Login screen fades in, in steps, like the refresh rate was like 5Hz, thus telling me the 175.19 drivers failed to load. From that point on, opening windows and dragging them around the screen or scrolling a webpage chugged obviously like how it would if no video drivers were loaded. I have the yellow icon in my device Manager as well.

Is this a confirmed 'bug'/issue?
Thanks for your time!

...I am wondering if I disconnect, say, my soundscard if that will make things well since it's one less device that the address space has to deal with (hardware memory, etc.)...I hope I am understanding the concept correctly....

EDIT: Threw in the /PAE for kicks (even though the /noexecute=optin was in the boot.ini already) and it seemed to work. Does anyone know if editing the size of the Page File have an effect on the /3GB switch's ability to reference RAM 'correctly'? Say, If I were to take it from 4096MB down to 1024MB, I wonder if that helps/hurts the 3GB switch. Obviously I would want to make it something like 2048 at least, but you get my drift.....

[jeeka]

Well that wasn't the fix. Booted up this morning and the same thing happened again. I had to shut down the machine, turn off the PSU wait for about 5 seconds, and bam, same thing. So I restarted again and it was all good again....

Thoughts?

[Nasgul]

I don't see why more RAM would not load up/fail to load your video drivers.

Maybe you need WHQL drivers, I'm on the 175.16 and last week I did a fresh Install of WinXP with SP3 and then loaded chipset, raid and video drivers along with every other software I needed installed, yet no issues thus far.

And I've run SystemMechanic to clean up a lot of files and same, no issues, I've played games and nothing and yes, I'm on a 32-bit with G.Skill and Team Group's Xtreem RAM.

My guess is your Corsair RAM.

How about timings? How are the timings and sub-timings? Maybe too much Vdimm?

[RADCOM]

Sounds like a video driver issue. Have you tried just removing the driver completely and then reloading it?

[Fungus]

the /3GB is the incorrect switch anyways, this limits the kernal and drivers to access only 1GB ram. use /PAE switch.

[jeeka]

Fungus, you sure? What are the main differences between the two beisdes lowering kernal's lot of memory?

I always thought that the 3GB switch was the way to go if you wanted to accomplish what I wanted to do.

Thoughts?

[WoZZeR999]

/3GB This switch forces x86-based systems to allocate 3 GB of virtual address space to programs and 1 GB to the kernel and to executive components. A program must be designed to take advantage of the additional memory address space. With this switch, user mode programs can access 3 GB of memory instead of the usual 2 GB that Windows allocates to user mode programs. The switch moves the starting point of kernel memory to 3 GB. Some configurations of Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 may require this switch.

From the way this sounds, there may be an issue with windows allocating the last 1gb of the 4gb address space to Kernal mode, and not being able to give it to the windows drivers.

[jeeka]

Actually the last 1GB of a 4GB setup on a 32-bit XP or Vista setup is not accessible at all. My 4GB shows 3.25GB total. But when the machine POSTS it shows the full 4096MB, that is telling you the board supports it, but at that moment the board does not know what OS is on the machine yet, and Windows 32-bit mode is 'bottlenecking' the RAM down...It's a 32-bit vs. 64-bit issue (among other things).

Machine has been working great in After Effects, it sure does like to use RAM. So instead of After effects getting access to about ~1.7GB of RAM now gets to play with ~2.6GB of RAM. which helps. It's not 2GB and 3GB for the reasons stated above (it might be that way if Windows was able to use the full 4GB in the first place, thus defeating the purpose of the 3GB switch for the most part.)....

Hope that helps, my brain is not that big, so I could be slightly off on some of the explanation. Just wanted to keep it 'tops of the trees' and not dive into the details too much.

[WoZZeR999]

Actually, there is still a 4gb space that windows uses for address ram. 512mb is taken from the 4gb allotment for the video card, taken from a Bit-tech article:
32-bit versus 64-bit operating systems: the 4GB memory limit
As you may or may not know, 32-bit operating systems are limited to addressing a maximum memory size of 4,294,967,296 bytes, or "4GB" in more normal terms. However, this 4GB is shared between all MMIO (Memory-Mapped Input Output) devices - this includes graphics cards. Therefore, that nice, shiny new 512MB graphics card you've just bought limits your entire system memory use to just 3.5GB. What about the newest Nvidia GeForce 280 GTX with 1GB of GDDR3? That'll reduce your system memory to just 3GB.
What I was trying to say in my post, is that the kernel are of the memory would only have around 256mb to 512mb of addressable space to load drivers and what not. If the video card drivers can't be loaded correctly, then the 'slow refresh' issue would occur.

To the OP: after a bit of reading (same bit-tech article):
Photoshop Elements 6 - Loading 20 Photos
We loaded the latest version of Photoshop Elements, and increased the memory use to 100 percent in the options. Adobe currently doesn't make a 64-bit Photoshop so it's memory footprint is limited to a maximum of 2GB, regardless of the amount of memory you install. We should expect to certainly see a benefit from a 2GB to 4GB memory system, but not necessarily 8GB. In this test we simply loaded 20 8MP JPEG photos straight from a Canon 400d Digital SLR camera (although firstly copied to the local system hard drive). We took an average time of how long it took to open all these photos ready for editing.


Reference article (http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2008/07/08/is-more-memory-better/1)

[HDCHOPPER]

that happens after a failed overclock for the first reboot... sometimes

just reboot and all is fine ( for me ) havent really found an answer either

[WoZZeR999]

So, to summarize, take off the /3gb because photoshop won't be able to use more than 2 gigs anyway.

[safan80]

Why not switch your windows to a 64bit version?