to get that you would have to switch to a multiple socket server board like intels 5000 series. there pricey and usually require buffered memory which is also expensive. if you really interested in a board designed for gaming like this you can look into intels skulltrail which is an intel 5400 chipset with dual 775 sockets and supports sli. the estimated price is about $500us.

another thing to note is most server boards require socket 771 for intel xenon, and a special socet for opterons on the amd side aswell.

thanks for the read. i was up readin since 10 am. i under stand it all now. that link explaind alot aswell.
it is doable to get 32bit vista to see more ram. but achtually ultilize it is another story.

well i installed vista ult x64 this morning and it is seein all 4gb of ram in the os and it seems to run quite abit faster processing. load up time is slower by about 10 seconds

True. Server memory in general also tends to be slower as it is usually Registered and contain ECC circuitry - which is great for servers that require reliability, but not so great for gaming as they slow the speed data is sent to the CPU.

i know that was the case with the old server sockets, i imagine the same thing applies to the new ones but i haven't built anything based on the 5000 series or the amd equivalent as of yet. but i don't believe skulltrail requires anything but plain old ddr2.

Could be, because I don't know a lot of the newer stuff so I could be spouting off old information. I've seen some stuff on the Intel Bonetrail (I believe it's called) but haven't looked into the Skulltrail yet... If I get some time this afternoon I will check it out but it's shaping up to be a busy day here.

We are running a copy of Server 2003 R2 at work on an HP Desktop DC5700. It has an e6300 chip and only 2 gigs of RAM. So you no longer need server hardware to run a version of Windows Server (as I was understanding from sbreeze316 that you would). I don't know about the 4gig limitation, maybe that part was what you were talking about sbreeze316 in your above post.

I may try it but I only have 2 gigs installed at home, but hopefully my other 2 will be in by friday. If it reports the full 4gigs than that should be a decent indication that it will run more even based on a normal desktop machine.

I could absolutely be wrong though. I won't deny that.

Matt

anyone can run server software, but the limitation isn't on servers not because of the os, but because each socket has a 32 bit pool, so every cpu can address up to 4gb of memory. so servers that run multiple cpu's can address a lot more memory in a 32 bit environment. but servers with 1 cpu on a mainstream desktop motherboard will still be capped to 4gb.

windows server editions are just modified home kernel's so regular hardware will still run it.

Cool. I guess I was misunderstanding what you said.

It's all good dude.

soooo basically what u are saying is. the reason why my buddy can post 7gb of ram is prolly because he has a quad core setup?... i started a big ol conversation here

no he is posting 7gb of ram becuase the system recognizes that its installed, seeing it and adressing it are very different. as for the quad, it still only has a single 32bit pool since its one socket(dual cores and quads are 2 or 4 cores on 1 physical cpu). if you take a look at server boards they have 3-4 banks for each socket and each set of four is dedicted to that cpu, so picture it as 2 or more motherboards crammed onto one pcb.