Anyway to stop GPU card from grabbing ram memory?

HotDog-Cart · Post by **HotDog-Cart** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 3:09 pm

Hey guys, I have a Nvidia Geforce 8600 and its a 512MB videocard. Yet it takes about 256mb from my ram, so it appears to be a 752MB when I look at it in dxdiag. (I'm pretty sure that means its taking 256mb from my ram.)

You see the problem is, I only have 1gb ram in my PC, and Vista needs a lot to run properly. I need that extra 256mb, as I constantly find my CPU going to 100% as theres very little RAM for a game to use. (Like, even on Halflife, My CPU goes to like 80% and sometimes 100%, I asked my boss at the store I work at, and he told me to get more RAM and that problem would be fixed.)

Yet, I dont have cash to buy ram right now, so I wanna stop my Videocard from grabbing 256mb (I think its grabbing 256, if not something near 256, maybe like 242mb) from my 1GB RAM. How do I do that?

(My "Free" ram is only about: 340mb when just running MSN, and IE. It drops even lower when I run a game.)

timmeh87 · Post by **timmeh87** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 9:32 pm

BIOS setting?

HotDog-Cart · Post by **HotDog-Cart** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 10:28 pm

Is there a setting in there for it?

kasar · Post by **kasar** » Wed Feb 20, 2008 7:52 am

at least in some of my mobo yes.
the option was "agp aperture size"

if your card is pcie try something with "pcie aperture size" "aperture size","graphics memory","shared memory" , ".... ect (the name maybe differs).

anyway idk if you can remove fully the shared memory, but at least you wil be able to drecrease the shared memory:

for example 256 to 32 or maybe less

HotDog-Cart · Post by **HotDog-Cart** » Wed Feb 20, 2008 9:06 pm

My bios doesnt have any of those. My PC has a pheonix bios, and its like press f2 to enter setup. So I go in, go to advanced and it just shows: GPU Memory: 512MB (Which cant be edited. As thats how much memory the card phsyically has.), AHCP: Enabled, and Windows Driver: Enabled.

metalfan1982 · Post by **metalfan1982** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 7:51 pm

a setting in the bios will not do it. I recommend switching back to xp. I like vista, however, you need a lot more than one gig of ram to run any games on it. Vista actually operates a lot smarter than xp in this..Unused ram is wasted ram, so it tends to use all it can get and not leave you much, unless you have a lot. Hence the shared memory between your video card and vista.
My computer which has 4 gigs of ram uses 30% of my ram idle, which is slightly more than a gig, my wifes, which has 2 gigs, also uses 30%, so there is a threshold.
If you decide to keep using vista, google "turn off prefetch" (applications will launch noticeably slower) Also turn off search indexing(your searches will no longer be instant) Tweakguides.com is a good source of info on how to turn off the not so important processes that are running in tha background.

Hope this helped. Also ram is really cheap at the moment, i got 4 gigs of OCZ(2x2gig sticks) pc2 6400(800 mhz) for less that 100$ after rebate(new egg) and i think the price went down

one more thing, this i am not sure of. i know vista automaticly shares some ram, and it does turn off aero and sidebar when in a fullscreen program IE a game, but Im relatively sure that your card will only use that ram for texture memory, the same thing it uses its own ram for...so as long as you don't put the games settings to high you should be fine. also, if you are not gaming or 3d rendering, i would not worry at all about your ram issue until you can afford more, as 340MB is plenty for surfing the web and watching vids, ect.