To limit system memory usage, adjust the maximum memory setting in msconfig.
To limit system memory usage, adjust the maximum memory setting in msconfig.
Someone might adjust the maximum memory setting to a lower value for troubleshooting or testing purposes. It’s not typically done for overclocking, but could be used to see how the system behaves with less RAM. This can help identify issues like crashes or instability when the system runs with reduced memory.
The only practical solution I see is with a device that has memory permanently built into it (like a laptop with soldered RAM), where you know the dead portion and adjust the limit in msconfg to avoid reaching that threshold. A poor example would be using it for a VM, since you’d want to control RAM but the VM tool should handle the memory limits instead.
Some buggy 32 bit applications may crash or have errors because they try to determine the available memory and they can't understand what 8 GB means (because they can only do calculations with up to 2 32 = 4,294,967,296 bytes ... or half this if using signed integers) Some server programs were licensed per core and per memory amount, any amount higher than some threshold would require you pay a higher license cost ... so let's say that software ran on some ancient machine and you cloned the drive and want to run it on new hardware but the smallest sticks you can use are 4 GB of memory.. you either run in a virtual machine, or just disable cores and memory to get hardware as close to old one. ... and there can be other reasons...
Windows 98SE is required when you have more than 512MB installed. I use a limiter on my dual-boot setups with retro systems. For newer operating systems, it's a useful method to evaluate software performance across varying RAM amounts without physically accessing the hardware.
I understand everything. It’s unclear what motivates someone to do that while overclocking a GPU. Kingpin even told Steve and Jay to consider it during their latest overclocking match.
It seems restricting memory usage would push the video card driver to allocate less RAM, possibly spreading that space over multiple cards for better performance. The driver would reserve some memory, copy data into that section, and then perform a PCI-E transfer, loading the information all at once. There might be advantages such as reduced latency or quicker VRAM access, though I’m not sure how it would specifically impact the card or its software.