Having more is often a good thing, but having too much of something could be useless or in many cases, bad. There’s a possibility that our computer actually wastes the precious RAM. In reality, if we have an operating system that still runs on 32-bit platform, it won’t accept 4GB of RAM or higher. On these machines, the maximum amount of usable RAM is only about 3.12GB. It is normal to be a bit concerned right now, but thankfully 32-bit systems usually don’t need anything higher than 3GB, except if we run latest games. One easy way to fix this is by upgrading to the 64-bit version of our operating system.
With 64-bit technology, we shouldn’t worry about future upgradeability. By pairing 2 with the power of 64, we could theoretically install 17 billion GB of RAM on the system. In fact, 64-bit computing is one thing that prepares us for the space age era. Current processors already have integrated 64-bit support so we don’t need to worry about having incompatible hardware. Many motherboards already support higher than 4GB of RAM address space, so we could just install 16GB of RAM.
Our processor should have integrated 64-bit instructions and it will make sure than all RAM space above 3.12GB will be addressed for proper uses. The BIOS of our motherboard should also include the memory remapping feature and this will allow us to move forward beyond 4GB of RAM. It would be marvellous to have a computer system that operates 16GB of RAM or higher. Some people would argue that we want need that much RAM, but people with extreme computing requirements can surely take advantage of any hardware resources available.
If we refuse to upgrade to 64-bit version of our operating system, then it is not really a good idea to have more than 3GB of RAM in our system. This is only acceptable for people who want to get most bangs for their buck. If they insist on using only 32-bit version of the operating system, they could have benefit only from the 0.12GB of RAM and the rest of the RAM amount will be unused, due unsupported address mapping.
So when we upgrade a computer system by putting together different components, it is important to remember one single rule that is. No matter how much RAM we use, it will not be too useful if we stick with only 32-bit operating system. In this case, there’s a limit to the amount of RAM we could use if we insist on using the 32-bit version of an operating system.
Popular games released in recent months could store dozens gigabytes of data in the hard disk drive. They will require higher amount of memory to run. The higher graphics details we set, the more RAM we need to support them. As an example, we may have a powerful graphics card and 1080p LCD monitor. We couldn’t waste their potential by choosing lower details and resolution because we only have 4GB of RAM in our system.