[solofx7]

I play a lot of games and currently I have a 2.4ghz MacBook Pro w/4gigs of ram and an 8600gt video card with 256mb of ram.
in the iMac i have 4gigs of ram that I will install tonight and the 2600 HD card with 256mb of video mem.
when i first played a game on the iMac it sucked and ran like poo.
I am going to install the ram tonight and try again.
Any thoughts as to why it ran so bad?
Is the 2600 that much worse that the 8600 ?
Also all 4gigs of the ram is not seen in boot camp windows, any thoughts as to why?
the iMac freakin' rocks!!!

[mduell]

The mobile 2600XT and 8600M GT have different strengths, so the relative performance varies by game. Barefeats has a few game benchmarks for what framerates to expect with each.

32-bit Windows only supports 3 or 3.5GB RAM; you need to buy 64-bit Vista (64-bit XP is eww) for 4GB+.

[solofx7]

Originally Posted by mduell 

The mobile 2600XT and 8600M GT have different strengths, so the relative performance varies by game. Barefeats has a few game benchmarks for what framerates to expect with each.

32-bit Windows only supports 3 or 3.5GB RAM; you need to buy 64-bit Vista (64-bit XP is eww) for 4GB+.

hmmm... if i installed 64bit windows, would everything work with it fine on the macbook pro?

[mduell]

I don't know if Apple has released a full collection of 64-bit drivers.

[solofx7]

gotcha thanks.
that is so odd that you cannot see over 3 gigs of ram!

[P]

There is only 4 gigs of memory space in the OS, and some peripherals take up part of the memory space for hardware communication - in particular, a 512 MB card takes up 512 megs of the OS logical memory space, dropping the max to around 3.5 gigs. Add a few other things, and you'll be stuck just above 3.

This doesn't stop certain companies to sell computers with more RAM than they can use: Dell is fine selling you a machine with 2 768 MB 8800 GTX cards and 4 gigs of RAM, knowing full well that you won't be able to use half of it.

Using 64-bit Windows doesn't really solve all that much, however: Some things - again, notably the graphics cards - will show up below the 4 gig boundary no matter what you do. To use all the RAM, some needs to be "hoisted" over the limit (so it uses the spaces 0-3 gigs and 4-5 gigs). This requires BIOS support, and I'd be very surprised if Apple has implemented something like that.