max crash at 1.8gb ram

[RErender]

Ben, some machines will not accept the3GB switch, at work I have a few machines that just blue screen it is odd because the other boxes with the identical specs work. One machine in particular started to bluescreen after updating the graphics driver while other boxes took the drivers fine, reverting to the previous drivers did not fix it, any ideas of what might cause this?

[Sushidelic]

Try probably setting the graphics aperture differently in your system bios -dunno if it will help though. The /3gb works only on xp proffesional and 2000 product of the enterprise edition, where classic win 2k professional is not part of it. there's a way to turn programs not designed for the 3gb switch to a 3gb aware application by using imagecfg.exe -l applicationname.exe. we did this with maya.exe and it works like charm.
greets, michael

[Biohazard]

The /3GB option may cause problems on some raid configurations too (such as promise i guess).

Else, in order to spare memory, you can switch off bitmap filterings on many maps (or even the global switch for filtering). It won't bother too much if you are rendering stills and you'll cut the memory consumption for your bitmaps by 2.