Date: Thu, 10 May 2007 13:17:09 -0700
From: Gary Kline <kline@tao.thought.org>
To: Tom Evans <tevans.uk@googlemail.com>
Cc: Garrett Cooper <youshi10@u.washington.edu>, Robert Huff <roberthuff@rcn.com>, FreeBSD Mailing List <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: WOW! {Or Holy whatever}
Message-ID: <20070510201709.GA59822@thought.org>
In-Reply-To: <1178814197.1231.48.camel@zoot.mintel.co.uk>
References: <20070509220908.GA50232@thought.org> <20070509230946.GA50585@thought.org> <F87B8C94-1473-4EB7-9DC2-6432D3F036E7@gmail.com> <20070510013453.GA52298@thought.org> <5CA2CC6B-72B6-46A1-9712-E258CFB4EB11@gmail.com> <4642A7F9.8070707@u.washington.edu> <17987.2963.612138.380335@jerusalem.litteratus.org> <46433EF8.2080805@u.washington.edu> <1178814197.1231.48.camel@zoot.mintel.co.uk>
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On Thu, May 10, 2007 at 05:23:17PM +0100, Tom Evans wrote: > On Thu, 2007-05-10 at 08:49 -0700, Garrett Cooper wrote: > > A good rule of thumb: Don't buy a video card with more RAM than 1/8 to > > 1/4 of the system RAM, because the RAM is shared with the system RAM, > > which means you have less overall system RAM to use for apps. > > > > -Garrett > > Er? Whilst I agree with the sentiment (low end graphics cards with 512MB > of RAM are solely there to rip off the unwary), that is complete tosh. > > Some cards dont have much/any onboard dedicated RAM; instead they use > system memory. Examples of these are nvidia cards labelled 'TC' (Turbo > Cache), most (all?) integrated intel video chipsets. > > The other issue is on i386. 32-bit systems have 4GB of address space to > use. Since you want to be able to address the graphics cards memory, > some of this address space is allocated so the OS can address the > memory. This means that if system RAM + video RAM > 4 GB, some of the > system RAM is unaddressable. That itself is a bit simplistic (its not 4 > GB, its ~3.5 GB, for various reasons.) > > The main point is that if you have a system with 1 GB of system RAM and > put in a graphics card with 640 MB of video RAM, you still have 1 GB of > system RAM to play with, even though you have gone over 1/4 of the > system RAM. > Urk! Can you hear the flip-flops spinning in my brain? Ok, once I have figuredout what is in Garrett's Dell I'll know if I even _want_ to spring for a new card. Assuming YES and assuming I look for an ASUS 6200: is it an AGP? 128M seems way overkill, but if the ASUS doesn't cheap-out and use system memory, I'd be happy. What say? gary > Tom -- Gary Kline kline@thought.org www.thought.org Public Service Unix
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