The good of high VRAM outside gaming

3d applications  

CAD programs. The more the better. You get Quadro cards with 6GB Vram. The highest amount you get on a gaming gpu is 3gb

If you look hard enough, you'll find some uses, such as those described by amuffin and gnomio. But aside from curiousity, if you don't know for a fact that you will need it, then you surely don't.

What about video editing or image manipulation, of which I do a lot of (I'm doing the latter right now). How much more of a loss of system RAM will I have if I upgrade from my current 256 MB to 1 GB? If I have 4 GB RAM and a 32-bit OS, I don't get the full 4 GB, but rather, 3 GB. Will I be down to 2.25 GB if I upgrade the video card? I'm looking into the 550 Ti, in case you're wondering, needed for faster video decompression in Virtual Dub since it's extremely slow.

Upgrade to a 64 bit os so you can get 4+gb of ram, however I do not believe virtual dub is gpu accelrated or cuda enabled. An application that supports cuda or gpu accerlation such as sony vegas or after effects runs about 10-60% faster in rendering and everything depending on the amount of cuda cores you have. Right now a 460 would be your best bet it has more cuda cores than the 550ti and has better performance. Also higher amounts of vram is needed especially when playing at higher resolutions.

At $300 for operating systems, let alone a $130 video card, they're already very expensive as it is, taking a nearly a year to save up enough and I've still got my RAM and HSF to upgrade yet as well. Besides, it's not very common I need more than 2 GB RAM, though I've only once ran into a case of needing more than 2.5 GB. Thus, RAM isn't much of an issue so I don't need a 64-bit OS yet. Virtual Dub does have options for Direct3D acceleration, along with OpenGL. I probably won't get my video card upgraded until January or so as it takes that long to save up....

Its only 100 for 64bit. Also just try rendering with open gl acceleration in vdub and overclock your gpu while thats happening to see how well vdub takes use of cuda.

This is the cheapest available and it's $190. Because of strict OEM limitations, considering I'm going to be changing hardware a lot, I have to get retail. I've already, in a way, saved $500 from getting retail over OEM from all the hardware changes I've made (3 motherboards, 1 video card, 3 CPUs, 2 or 3 RAM, 2 power supplies, 2 hard drives, etc. all since February 2006). As long as I can make Windows 7 like I have my Windows XP set up (which resembles Windows 98 in a way), then I generally don't care which edition I get. I'd have to check Microsoft's site to find out what the differences are.

As to overclocking my video card, that I don't know how to do. I don't see a setting in the BIOS for this (no multiplier) so either my motherboard doesn't support it, or my video card's multiplier is locked. I can modify the clock on my CPU just fine (of which I won't do until I upgrade from the stock HSF, the next thing after my video card, likely about 4 or 5 months from now).

Edit: it appears that I may need the professional edition of Windows 7. This is because I use Word and Excel, of which are essentially productivity programs. Being a game programmer, that might also have an effect.

here you go
http://forum.notebookreview.com/windows-os-software/428...

Retail and oem are the same but it's the keys that affect if you can transfer them to other pcs. But you can just call microsoft and they'll unlock the key to let you switch motherboard as the key is tied to the mobo not the other components. (XP keys also auto unlock each year, I'm not sure if they continued this with 7 as I never tried.) You do not need pro to run word or excel, where did you hear this? Unless you need more than 16gb ram or run old software that only works on xp then you will be fine with home premium. If you know anyone with a student email, you can get a student discount at $65.

You do not overclock a discrete gpu through bios, you can use msi afterburner, though I doubt the little boost will help much.

I'm not a big fan of OEM OS. I'd rather bite the bullet than ask MS to unlock the key.