Yes, I installed XP SP3 (32-bit) on a Z97 board; but Intel hasnt updated driverschipset software for newer USB3 boards for XP and the last board capable of doing both hacked PAE and native USB3 would be the H67 with a pre Maxwell GPUHaswell CPU with a 4GB 970 at most.

FTP releasespacking is currently paused, FTP applications will continue but will be delayed.

Since none on their own needed more than 1gb on average, workgroups would typically pile every sort of service onto one machine before x64 was a thing.

Its completely reasonable to use a 32-bit OS, but that has mainly been reserved for ARM devices.

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Yeah. I think thats mainly because of upgradability, just in case some users might want to upgrade their ram past 4 GB without having to buy a different copy of Windows (as most likely, the copy included in recovery media is 32 bit if the system came with 32 bit Windows).

But, I still recommend 64 bit Windows if you have 4 GB or more of RAM, as some newer software REQUIRE 64 bit Windows to even run.

Even without that, the only real benefit to running 32 bit Windows is if you need to run DOS or 16 bit Windows applications (as 32 bit Windows even up to Windows 10 still have the NT Virtual DOS Machine).

But, if you dont need that (or are using DOSBoxan virtual machine program to run legacy applications), go 64 bit.

There also was the PAE usermode AWE OS API provided by Windows to overcome the 2GB3GB 32Bit limitation.

Mostly used by DB products like Oracle and MSSQL, before 64bit was a thing, it uses a similar trick as the older DOS EMM386EMS to map inout pages from the 2GB space and allocate them in the extra memory, but unlike the older DOS trick, the app had to be programmed specifically to use AWE.

Also access to the extra memory was slower than access to local memory, so the API never gained traction and kept used only in DB world until 64bit finally buried it in the computer history (well, not really, actually 64bit in x86 makes extensive use of PAE technology ).

In general the reason why it was disabled on client versions is because of stability issues with drivers above the 4GB RAM mark iirc.

I had an 8 way Pentium pro with 8gb and NT4 Enterprise although when I got it I upgraded it to 2003 so I never messed with Enterprise NT 4 that much.

The choice to not usesupport PAE on client editions after XP SP1 is as guessed due to drivers.

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In current times, NVIDIAs post-328 series drivers (Maybe it was 346) which is required 900 series and higher fail to work with community developed PAE hacks (Up to Windows 7) on GPUs with more than 4GB of dedicated vram due to the similar memory pinhole shadow issue (Think AMIBIOS circa 1997) that affects mapping the memory segments in direct conflict with the system memory due to decisions made with the PCIe architecture.

Microsoft supplied and WHQLd drivers function without incident on PAE, and rumor is that AMDATI cards work with acceleration on PAE hacked installs.

NVIDIA stopped putting in the extra effort but history which gets mentioned a lot here clearly shows it was once possible, so its not due to a limitation of the operating system.

The obvious solution would be to null out the remaining memory so the OS remains unaware of its existence and employ an SMBIOS hack to trick the OS into thinking the GPU only had 3GB.

The 960 is actually technically supported by the last NVIDIA driver versions in PAE; my 980 has 8GB so its a non-starter.

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