Well, of course I checked. It's an Intel SE7505VB2 Dual-CPU Server board. It can handle up to 8GB! as long as each bank set of DDR DIMMS are matched (and they are). The BIOS shows 4GB... Windows XP Pro (now SP2) still shows 3GB. There are no BIOS settings (like PAE) that could effect this. There are two possibilities: a new BIOS flash may fix this or XP just doesn't get it. For the latter, this seems rather possible since a friend of mine has the exact same hardware (but with dual 3.06GHz instead of dual 2.66GHz Xeons) and only sees 3 of 4GB as well with WinXP Pro. Now, for the former, there is a slight problem. There is a newer flash firmware for the BIOS, but I haven't been able to flash it whatsoever. Can only use floppy Phlash and it continually complains about memory management. I've even went as far as removing ALL hardware attached to the board or purposely turning ON memory management (and it said that it was already running...as suspected). I've asked for support twice from Intel in the past year (!) trying to resolve this problem with no response at all. I guess as long as you didn't buy one of their "full" server systems for $10K, you don't get support (even if you purchased their CPUs and motherboard for $2K). Oh well... :(

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do, you blow your whole leg off.

 -- Bjarne Stroustrup

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