Computer Upgrade Question

[jute]

Apologies if this is a silly question. If my computer uses DDR ram, can I use a video card that has DDR2 ram?

[Csonicgo]

Yes. They shouldn't conflict with each other.

[jute]

Great. Thanks for the help!

[Nomad]

Yeah, that won't be an issue! The two don't share ram as far as I know. Only onboard graphics chips do that, as far as I know.

[Belial]

Nomad said:

Only onboard graphics chips do that, as far as I know.

Some do, some don't. Mine takes 512MB out of the available ram and sticks to that, but I know of ones that when checked with hardware analysis tools report the whole ram as video memory.

[Maes]

Belial said:

Some do, some don't. Mine takes 512MB out of the available ram and sticks to that, but I know of ones that when checked with hardware analysis tools report the whole ram as video memory.

Onboard graphics used to be statically allocated (and in some implementations, fixed. BTW, what happens if you reduce your RAM total to 512MB or less?).

Nowadays the amount of reserved memory is "dynamically managed", at least under certain OSes, and there's usually no easy way to find out how much they are using at a given moment.

[Aliotroph?]

I've seen an olde laptop from the Windows ME days where you could dynamically set the amount of RAM allocated to the GPU. It ranged from 4 MB to 16 MB out of the machine's total of 64 MB. *shudder* That was a horrible computer in so many other ways.

[chungy]

Onboard graphics still tend to do that, although it's usually more intelligent (taking RAM only as needed, freeing RAM when no longer in use for graphics). Intel GMA drivers for both Linux and Windows have this function, at least.

[Belial]

Maes said:

BTW, what happens if you reduce your RAM total to 512MB or less?

I'm fairly sure there's a BIOS option that lets me set the amount of ram used by onboard video.

EDIT: Yep, 32-512MB.

[Maes]

Belial said:

I'm fairly sure there's a BIOS option that let's me set the amount of ram used by onboard video.

EDIT: Yep, 32-512MB.

You are lucky to still have a BIOS setting. What chipset do you have? Intel GMA chipsets nowadays usually don't have any explicit way of setting the amount of video RAM (no option in the BIOS or the drivers). I hope the situation is different for integrated nVidia/Ati.

[Belial]

The chipset is an AMD790GX so the integrated gfx is ATI HD 3300.