jute Posted July 20, 2009 Apologies if this is a silly question. If my computer uses DDR ram, can I use a video card that has DDR2 ram? 0 Share this post Link to post
Csonicgo Posted July 20, 2009 Yes. They shouldn't conflict with each other. 0 Share this post Link to post
Nomad Posted July 20, 2009 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. 0 Share this post Link to post
Belial Posted July 20, 2009 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. 0 Share this post Link to post
Maes Posted July 20, 2009 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. 0 Share this post Link to post
Aliotroph? Posted July 20, 2009 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. 0 Share this post Link to post
chungy Posted July 20, 2009 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. 0 Share this post Link to post
Belial Posted July 20, 2009 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. 0 Share this post Link to post
Maes Posted July 20, 2009 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. 0 Share this post Link to post
Belial Posted July 20, 2009 The chipset is an AMD790GX so the integrated gfx is ATI HD 3300. 0 Share this post Link to post