Peter M

[NDC]

I know you're very knowledgeable with motherboards so if you could please spare me your time, I'd really appreciate it.


I have a setting in my BIOS called "Memory Remapping" and is Enabled by default. It says that it loads PCI devices above 4GB of memory and says it should not be disabled unless user is certain that the installed OS supports over 4GB or memory.

Here is my main question:

1. I don't have 4GB of memory installed for one thing, I have 1GB.

2. Windows XP supports up to 4GB of memory, not over.

Should this field be enabled or disabled in my BIOS?


Thanks,

NDC

[NDC]

Here is what I'm talking about... By the way, the motherboard is a Tyan i7505 (S2668AN)

[Peter M]

That doesn't remap PCI devices (you can't, PCI in general has only 32-bit addressing). What it does is remap memory to above 4 GByte so that even with a full 4-GB RAM population, there is room below 4 GBytes for PCI devices and other misc system devices (BIOS ROM, APICs etc.).
With Xeon processors having (rather silly) physical address expansion to access a 36-bit address space, the RAM can still be used by an operating system that knows how to use PAE.

[NDC]

So are you saying I can Disable it or I should keep it Enabled?


TIA

[NDD]

Guest of honor
Long time not seen NDC

I believe it shouldn't matter with less then 4GB RAM installed ...

[NDC]

Hey ND! Thx! Yeah, long time no see! Don't see you on ICQ anymore. Stop using it?

[Peter M]

Originally posted by NDC
So are you saying I can Disable it or I should keep it Enabled?


TIA

It doesn't matter at all, as long as you don't populate enough RAM to come close to the address space where your PCI devices map to. In general that'd require more than 3 GBytes of RAM present.

[NDC]

Thank you for your reply, Peter.