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Intel Xeon E5-1620 OCed to 4.75GHZ
Asus P9X79 Pro
8GB 1333 7-7-7-20(Thinking about 24GB)

I am considering to install Ubuntu.

Will the 32Bit version support more RAM than 4GB?

guntbert
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Ivan G
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1 Answers1

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Yes, 32-bit Ubuntu can now utilize more than 4Gb RAM through the use of PAE. To check if your computer supports PAE, run this command in terminal:

grep --color=always -i PAE /proc/cpuinfo

However, it is often recommended to use 64-bit Ubuntu to get the full benefits of using the 64-bit architecture. It should be noted that there is no "Virtual Address Extension", which means that applications still get the same amount of virtual memory since the virtual addresses are still 32 bits while the physical addresses are 36 bits. Therefore PAE is not at all equivalent to a 64 bit system.

To read more about the 32-bit versus the 64-bit architectures, I check out the following pages:

Since you're running only Windows currently, I don't know how you can check if your hardware supports PAE.

Community
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ananaso
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    I looked up the processor, it's 64-bit compliant and came out in early 2012. It probably shipped with Win7 64-bit installed. I have no doubt it supports PAE but I'd recommend just installing Ubuntu 64-bit so you can take full advantage of the CPU's abilities. From my experience 32-bit PAE doesn't improve things much, especially on a 64-bit processor. For more about the CPU check out the Intel Ark page here: http://ark.intel.com/products/64621/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-1620-10M-Cache-3_60-GHz-0_0-GTs-Intel-QPI – japzone Mar 27 '13 at 03:32
  • This might work for something: http://superuser.com/questions/320992/how-to-check-if-pae-is-enabled-windows-7-32-bits – Frederik Spang Mar 29 '13 at 20:10