would installing xp64 help any?

The fact that you're getting a flat 2GB suggests to me that there's a BIOS switch set to remap all memory above 2GB to addresses above 4GB. This way the 64-bit Apple OS can use the memory. You could unflip that BIOS setting to see more in XP but you'll end up seeing a little less in the MacOS.

Upgrading to XP64 would solve that problem but then you need to make sure you have all the right drivers for that computer.

More modern motherboards seem to break the memory allocation automatically, and right at the spot it needs to be done at. The fact that your's gives you an even 2GB is what makes me think there's a BIOS setting.

Rob

That makes sense that it is a BIOS setting given the even 2 GB break.

Not familiar with Apple/MACs but I don't get why a 64bit OS would need to remap some ram above the 4 GB line unless it's just some arbitrary way Apple set up their address space.

Just found out that Bootcamp doesn't support XP64.

Just read about this and it's what I'd suspected.
Even with XP64 yes, you can address more RAM however the amount of RAM space used by the hardware remains exactly the same. So if you've got 4GBs, going to XP64 gains you nothing. This is simply a hardware issue, as in how PCs work.
You might be able to remap the hardware devices above the 4GBs of physical RAM space but the article I read indicated this is a bit unreliable.

Bob.

The problem with Windows on an INTEL Mac is that the EFI Bios does not map above 2Gb RAM in Boot Camp.under X.

I believe that users with Vista are getting 3Gb but I'm not certain of that as I run XP on my Mac and I have 6Gb of RAM and only get 2Gb under XP and Boot Camp.

Unless Apple rewrite the EFI bios to fix the problem the only time you can access your memory is when running Mac OSX. The most recent firmware upgrades did address some Boot Camp issues but not the amount of RAM the system can access in boot camp.

Regards
New Hope Media

Bootcamp is however compatible with Vista x64, as confirmed by MacInsider and numerous others, including this How-To.

Install it and get ATI video drivers from ATI.

I get envious when I see Mac Pro machines shipping with 16GB RAM, and one company now announcing 32GB availability with fatter RAM chips.

More RAM is very helpful in many situations, it is freakin' time for the manufacturers to step up to the plate and get rid of this stupid 640K, er, 2GB limit.

Leopard, due out this month for the Mac, is all 64-bit. That means they won't have a 32-bit OS for normal use and a 64-bit OS for mad scientists and gamers/reckless experimenters only, like Microsoft seems to suggest currently.

Dump Boot camp, get more RAM and use the Mac O/S. Of course you will then want to run PremierPro and not Vegas.

I never saw the value of getting a Mac and then throwing half of it away with Boot camp.

Premier Pro on the Mac seems to work well, but Encore (their DVDA equivalent) doesn't seem to be ready for prime time.

I think it's too early for any Mac user to choose anything but FCP.

EFI is Intel's 21st century replacement for the BIOS code written by IBM in 1979.

It's sad that Microsoft didn't bite on EFI, as it would have saved Windows users a lot of headaches.

Hmmm. I'm not using a Mac but BootCamp sounds like a glorified boot loader and it just shouldn't matter what second, third, or fourth OS you're trying to run.

Since you can have multiple boot options on a Linux system with a boot loader like LILO or GRUB, I'd think you could do the same with the MAC OS too. Maybe there's a limitation based on the way they store boot information on the hard drive.

You absolutely MUST use a 64-bit version of Windows to address ANY memory address above 4GB. 32-bit XP or Vista will never, ever address memory above 4GB (except possibly with a /PAE switch).

The motherboard you're describing sounds very similar to what our HP XW9300 systems are using, and these have a 2GB switch in the BIOS that causes any 32-bit OS to only see 2GB even if you have more installed.

Rob Mack

It's not quite true that it gains you nothing. Memory is hardware too, and the DIMMs get addresses just like all the other hardware devices. The difference is that memory can be remapped to new addresses, graphics cards can't, or aren't.

If all the stars are in alignment, you have a 64-bit capable BIOS, Chipset, and OS, then you should be able to see all 4GB of RAM installed. However, if your BIOS or Chipset has a limit of 8GB, and you install 8GB, you'll have less than that addressable in exactly the same way that a 32-bit OS can't address an entire 4 GB, simply because you've got a lot of non-DIMM hardware using a range of addresses below 4GB.

Rob Mack

I suspect the issue is that Apple needs to write code to make the EFI 21st century monitor (firmware) look like a "1979 BIOS with 28 years worth of hacks and patches to make modern operating systems work."

They did that in a way that has been proven to work for Windows XP32, Vista 32 and Vista 64.

So use Vista 64.

Actually the limit in Boot Camp under Windows XP32 is 2Gb not the 4Gb of standard 32 bit Windows on a PC. So EFI is limiting the RAM below what the limits of a 32 bit OS is capable of.

I still find Vegas a useful editing platform but as for using the Mac Pro I do have, and am slowly migrating my editing into, FCP (Studio 2)

New Hope Media

Possibly really dumb question here but just what does having 16GB of RAM gain me over 2GB?
Nothing that I've ever tried to do or watched being done with video or even DIs left me with the feeling that it needed huge slabs of RAM. Wickedly fast CPUs maybe, the fastest disk arrays money could buy, absolutely.
Worst case scenrio in this game, many TBs of DPX files to be graded in RT, that means shifting all the TBs through the CPU to do some maths on them and shuffle them off to another dozen TBs of disks. Where does a relatively midget amount of RAM start to have any impact on this?

Even with Vegas and HDV, running say an 8 track composite, rendering it to RAM is woefully slow, how would more RAM help even here, the process seems CPU bound, cacheing stuff in RAM doesn't seem logical to me as offering any speedup, how does the app know what to cache without reading my mind.

And one final not so dumb question, why if OSX is such a great OS do none of the high end tools in this game run on it, e.g. Scratch, Speedgrade and Fusion? Some do run on Unix as well as Windoz but not OSX.

Bob.

Or why has ABC TV Australia dumped all its AVIDS and is changing to FCP right through from offline to online editing?
Change over date for Sydney is early January and the first systems are in the building now for training the editors.

Just the 5 x Quad Mac Pro for the Compressor render farm hanging off the edit network is somewhat mind blowing...

Steve

16 GB of RAM doesn't gain you anything over 2 GB in applications that are not designed to use RAM. This included Vegas, which is very "RAM efficient" (can be good or bad depending on the circumstances, here I think it is very good).

After Effects and Photoshop are major RAM hogs. There is virtually no amount they can't gobble up when working with big composites.

Many key applications were developed when Macs were running on honky PowerPC CPUs. That made the Macs at the time unsuitable for high performance work, so developers had only one choice: PC architecture with either Windows or Linux.

With Apple's switch to Intel, the pendulum is slowly swinging around. This takes time, and Apple didn't make it all that easy to port apps to the new Intel architecture, perhaps because it took them a long time to make all the critical choices for development environments.

OS X today provides a lot of high level services that earlier OS's didn't provide, whether earlier versions of OS X or Windows XP/Vista.

This has made possible tools like FxFactory Pro which allows users to write their own effects without coding. Quite nice and high quality actually.

Btw, CGI-rich feature film and TV series composites often run into 600 - 800 layers for composites.

The answer from at least one developer is "driver rollback". Windoz does it, OSX doesn't.
Personally I'd add Apples atrocious hardware design, they only built one decent system hardware wise and that was decades ago with the pizza box Nubuss system.

And then there was the classic from my Macolite workmate: "OSX doesn't crash like Windows, you just need to restart it regularly". This was after he couldn't eject a CD half way through a CD copy.

Bob.

Sometimes the explanations of these things are overly simplified, mainly because you don't need to know much. However way you slice it though, it seems that a Mac can't provide more than 2GB of usable memory to 32-bit windows, (and most likely can't do it for 32-bit Linux either).

Rob

I can't really say that you do need 16 GB of RAM, but people using Vegas do run out of memory, usually using stills. Other NLEs like PPro have had extreme problems with memory starvation.

I really don't know how much memory you really need, but evidently Vegas could use more than 2GB sometimes.

Rob Mack

Apple's atrocious hardware design

It's a surprise to me why anyone would suggest that. Can you give me some examples of what you are thinking of?

I am yet to see a PC workstation at any price that beats a Mac Pro for hardware design, and regular PCs are certainly no match at all.

And as for OS X and Windows XP, I find them both to be rock steady, no difference really, although I note that some other people have problems with either.