Does Xeon E5506 support physical address extension?

[idata]

Hello,

A client of mine wants to add memory to his HP Proliant ML350 G6 server. The server currently has 4GB installed, running Windows Server 2008 Standard 32 bit and a Xeon E5506 processor. According to Microsoft a 32 bit version of Windows Server 2008 Standard can only supprt 4GB of memory. I'm wondering if my processor supports physical address extension and if this would be a plausible option for us to improve system performance. I don't have any expereince with PAE and am not sure that this would improve performance even if our processor supports this technology. Looking for some advice from those who have expereince with this. Thanks in advance.

[RGiff]

You can add all the Ram you want , But the 32Bit OS will only see 3.3 GB.

[idata]

According to the MS article link below it seems that certain Windows 32 bit OS's can access more then 4GB through physical address extension. The Xeon E5506 processor supports this. Until I read this I thought 4Gb was the max for 32 bit OS's. Am I interpreting the MS article incorrectly?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366796%28VS.85%29.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366796%28VS.85%29.aspx

[RGiff]

After reading the article , Note: PAE does not change the amount of virtual address space available to each process, each process running 32 Bit windows is still limited to a 4 GB virtual address space.

[DSilv11]

I have never tried to enable PAE in a x64 processor, but the artical you link indicates it will not work.

"The Intel Itanium and x64 processor architectures can access more than 4 GB of physical memory natively and therefore do not provide the equivalent of PAE."

[Edward_Z_Intel]

The Xeon E5506 processor does support PAE, however Windows Server 2008 Standard 32-bit can only support 4GB memory. If you want to use PAE to access more than 4GB memory, you'll need Enterprise edition. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778(VS.85).aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778(VS.85).aspx

[idata]

Thanks for the response guys.

[RGiff]

Why don't you just get a 64 Bit OS ?

[idata]

The server's been in production for a couple of years now. My client is concerned that the latest software upgrade to his electronic health records may require a little more RAM. But the latest version isn't installed yet so we don't know that for sure. Wish I would have gone with 64 bit when we first purchased the system.