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Wrath Of Dragons · Mar 11, 2007, 05:17 AM // 05:17

So, today i was messing around in the inital setup screen (in the bios, i think)
and found an option to use both my dedicated vram AND use shared system memory. Is this bad, if i have ram to spare? will it increase power consumption? and.....any other comments?

thanks

Kuldebar Valiturus · Mar 11, 2007, 05:26 AM // 05:26

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wrath Of Dragons

So, today i was messing around in the inital setup screen (in the bios, i think)
and found an option to use both my dedicated vram AND use shared system memory. Is this bad, if i have ram to spare? will it increase power consumption? and.....any other comments?

thanks

Do you have an integrated Video card perhaps? I vaguely recall a shared/dedicated setting but it was years ago on an early nForce1 based PC I had with integrated video.

If I'm not mistaken this is akin to using "shadow" RAM. On newer systems, meaning non-ancient, you usually do not want to use these settings because they can result in conflicts.

Some info dredged from the Net:

Do you have a PCI Express video card? If so, it appears this setting you refer to is there for you to use if your vid card is a little on the weak side. If this isn't the case, shared system memory would probably just cause a performance hit.

Quote:

Video memory (VRAM) is Random access memory for storing video information. There are two types of VRAM: shared and dedicated. Shared VRAM allows the notebook's graphics card to access and share a portion of system memory, while dedicated VRAM are VRAM chips on the notebook motherboard (i.e. memory dedicated for use by the graphics card).

Wrath Of Dragons · Mar 11, 2007, 06:06 AM // 06:06

nope im on a laptop, bout a year old.
It has a ATI x200m 128 dedicated card, 1278 ram(or close), so I was going to set it to being 128system/128vram

it might be integrated.....im not sure.

HP pavillion zv6130 us

MegaMouse · Mar 11, 2007, 06:17 AM // 06:17

Dedicat ram is just that. It is used exclusivly by the video card. I have a laptop with an ATI 200M also and it has 128 megs of dedicated ram.I have tried the 128 + 128 shared and saw no difference at all. I do not think you will have a perfoemance hit but neither will you see a difference. Just stick with the dedicated ram for the video card and you will be nfine.

Mega Mouse

Randomway Ftw · Mar 11, 2007, 01:58 PM // 13:58

If you have a normal graphics card I wouldn't touch any setting for an integrated card because it will probably screw some stuff up, and integrated cards usualy suck and/or are very slow.

tijo · Mar 11, 2007, 05:53 PM // 17:53

Your card is very capable of handling GW on it's own so i'd advise not using the shared memory since it will take resources for nothing basically.

Mushroom · Mar 13, 2007, 02:57 PM // 14:57

The ATI 200M chipset does have 128 MB of dedicated video RAM. It can also use up to 128 MB of system ram if you want to improve performance (this is similar to the "Hypermemory" on some of the X series desktop cards).

As a general rule of thumb, you want to have 3x the amount of desktop RAM if you want to use it in a shared mode. So unless you have at least 384 MB (or higher) of system RAM, you do not want to share any of it. And if you have XP, you never want your useable system RAM to go below 256 MB, or performance will greatly suffer.

FlameoutAlchemist · Mar 14, 2007, 03:05 AM // 03:05

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mushroom

The ATI 200M chipset does have 128 MB of dedicated video RAM. It can also use up to 128 MB of system ram if you want to improve performance (this is similar to the "Hypermemory" on some of the X series desktop cards).

As a general rule of thumb, you want to have 3x the amount of desktop RAM if you want to use it in a shared mode. So unless you have at least 384 MB (or higher) of system RAM, you do not want to share any of it. And if you have XP, you never want your useable system RAM to go below 256 MB, or performance will greatly suffer.

Mushroom's right on the money. Generally speaking, even if you don't see a performance hit, if you take that memory away from the system, it means that the system will have less to play with, which is never a good thing.