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Memory sticks, 32 and 64 Bit OS

Will Windows 7 32 bit edition support 8 GB RAM? or it will only support 4 GB.

Will i have to buy 64 bit version if i want to use 8 GB RAM?

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closed as exact duplicate by Sathya♦, quack quixote May 14 '10 at 6:29

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32-bit operating systems only support up to 4GB (actually less) of RAM. So yes, you will have to get the 64-bit version of Windows to use 8GB of RAM.

There are some hacky ways to enable more than 4GB of memory on a 32-bit machine, though. For example, you can use PAE (Physical Address Extension), but that's slower than simply installing a 64-bit OS. There is a kernel patch that enables this for Windows 7, but I wouldn't recommend it: it's risky and not worth the trouble when you can just install the 64-bit version of Windows.

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Read the PAE article you linked. 32-bit OSes most certainly can use more than 4 GB of RAM. Also, x86-64 adds an extra level of page table indirection over PAE. It's in no way "faster" than PAE. It's also not appreciably slower. It may be possible to detect in a microbenchmark, but it certainly won't involve a perceptible performance hit. Same with PAE enabled vs PAE disabled. What's more, PAE is almost always enabled on current systems because it's required for NX support. – afrazier May 14 '10 at 3:28
@afrazier: +1 for insight :) msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778(VS.85).aspx – akira May 14 '10 at 7:21
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