When I specced out the upgrade of my home computer I decided on the Intel DG41RQ mainboard, which is nearly the same as the DG41TX mainboard that my new (at start of this year) work computer has. The DG41RQ is specced for DDR2-800 RAM with two slots and a maximum supported level of 8 GB. However, DDR2-800 RAM is economically available only to a maximum of 2 GB per DIMM unless you want to quadruple the price to get a 4 GB DIMM. I don’t know if this situation will change for DDR2 memory. If it doesn’t then this board is effectively limited to 4 GB maximum, of which only 3 GB is effectively useful in 32-bit editions of Windows. I could install Windows x64 on my home computer and get a boost of 800 MB of extra memory available, but most apps I use at home are 32 bit and due to the emulation layer for x86 code, they actually run slightly slower on a 64-bit OS. As well, the 64-bit edition uses up more memory when loading the 32 bit applications than the 32-bit edition does. The result is, that I just can’t see the point of going up to x64 Windows at the moment. On the face of it the DG41TX is more up to date because it can use DDR3 RAM which comes in up to 4GB sizes at present. However this board is limited to 4 GB maximum.
The bigger concern is that the DG41RQ board does have this effective limit of only 4 GB of RAM. When I got my previous system 5-6 years ago it came with 512 MB, which in the course of its life got upgraded to 1.5 GB, partly easier to do because it had four slots, but also because the previous edition of DDR came up to at least 1 GB per DIMM. As such going to DDR2 and finding there is an effective limit of 2 GB per DIMM is a pretty poor advance, considering boards with DDR2 were being installed in new computers only a year ago. It means this board can’t really have any more memory put in it. Ideally I would like to go up to that 8 GB and put in x64 Windows, but I can’t do that without replacing the board and CPU. When I specced the board, I knew as LGA775 it was pretty much the last of the line; the newer generation LGA1156 was available, but more expensive. This is just something you have to be careful about. What it means is that I probably will have to upgrade this computer in three years’ time instead of five.
These are the annoying tricks that manufacturers like Intel pull on consumers all the time. The technology gets obsolescent faster and faster these days.