To start off, I know Vista 32 will never be able to show all 4 gigs of ram. I hope sooner or later Vista 64 is reliable enough with games to make it worth while. I'd switch to that and slap in 8 GB if it was.

However, I have 4GB installed in my Vista Ultimate 32 system. With one PNY 8800 Ultra installed, all Vista screens show 3.25GB available (in control panel / system info screen and in the boot up "welcome to" screen)

See screen shots:



screen 2



However, when I install a 2nd PNY 8800 Ultra in SLI, the available ram drops to a whopping 2.5 GB (and Vista RAM score drops from 5.9 with one card, down to 5.6 with two)



screen 2



It appears to me, that somehow these cards are "using" my system memory, as well as their own 768 MB on each card. (Kind of like a laptop). Is there anyway to stop this??? I would like all 3.25GB available to Windows!

I swore when SLI first came out, that it would be a short lived fad and would quickly fade away (just like multiple CPUs on the same motherboard. Remember back when you could get two 486 DX2s @ 50 mhz on the same mobo! Man that was cool...) In any case, it looks like SLI is here to stay a while, and I'd like to be able to actually use it (In Vista)

Thanks guys