Discrete vid card + DDR3 advertised as 'shared' ???

[xparatrooper]

Hello,
I am shopping for a Dell XPS and the Dell site says it comes with an Nvidia vid card and 2GB of memory... plush I can get 6GB or 8GB of DDR3 `shared` memory?? is this a typo? or: what is it shared with? how will that impact performance? Thanks for any light you can shed. Tom's MADE me pick a sub-category... Corsair was the closest I could think of ??

 

[henydiah]

shared` memory?? :
shared memory is the use of some or several to be used by the VGA onboard (IGP = internal GPU), the amount of memory consumption IGP sharing depends on the spec itself is determined by vendors such as 64MB -512 MB ​​and still added the IGP core like 225-800 over. and an indication of sharing the memory usage will be notified by windows 7 (example: 8GB of memory installed and Usable 6.9GB) This means that the IGP has been using over 1GB.
If you do not want to use the VGA memory share the Addon like Nvidia or Radeon and the IGP must be disabled from the Bios.

 

[xparatrooper]

If you do not want to use the VGA memory share the Addon like Nvidia or Radeon and the IGP must be disabled from the Bios.

So, motherboards are equipped with an onboard IGP even though they can utilize a discrete video card? I always thought that the motherboard for use with a separtate video card would NOT be the same as a motherboard for use with an integrated video processor.

So you are saying I can make a change in the BIOS, and my RAM will not be shared?

 

[henydiah]

yep .. just go disabled IGP in bios and use vga addon

 

[xparatrooper]

Best answer selected by xparatrooper.