VRAM, Win7 32 bit, Maximum Physical Memory of 4 GB becoming 3GB, forthe last time

[RayLopez99]

I thought I had this figured out, but I guess not.

I have 4 GM RAM, two sticks, for my Intel i5 machine running 32-bit Windows7. I have a video card by ATI Radeon that has (I think, pretty sure) 1 GB Video RAM. I don't think I have on-board video graphics card (Intel integrated graphics card) in any way disabled in BIOS (there may or may not be a setting for this, but I kept it at default which means it's probably on). I think the OS is smart enough to know that when I am using the Radeon video card, it should ignore the onboard integrated graphics card, but for reasons explained below it probably does not matter.

So Physical Memory is 3061 says Windows Task Manager, since, I think (aftersurfing the net for about a half hour and seeing what looks like conflicting information), what happens is that your VRAM is subtracted from your 4 GB system memory RAM, so 4-1 = 3 GB (rounding).

Therefore, if I buy a 2 GB Video RAM Card (I did not even realize they makethese, but gamers use them), on this system, my available RAM (Physical Memory) would be 4-2 = 2GB, correct? Not that I plan to do so, just curious.

In any event, since I don't do any heavy duty graphics, I don't care about video too much, but am wondering, short of upgrading to 64-bit (which I would never do, too much hassle), if there's any way to increase the system RAM to something closer to the 4 GB limit for 32-bit OS Win 7? I think (and hope) the answer is "no"--unless I'm some sort of hard core overclocker which I'm not. Under MSConfig.exe "Boot Advanced Options" there is a checkbox"Maximum Memory" but I don't want to touch that (it's unchecked at the moment) for reasons I read about 20 minutes ago but have since forgotten, however, my intuition tells me not to go there.

RL

Info from various screen scrapes and my system

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/978610


My system according to SiSoft diagnostics:

On-board Devices
Onboard IGD : Video Adapter (Enabled) <--does disabling this free up RAM ifI have a video card? Apparently not.
Onboard LAN : Ethernet Adapter (Enabled)
Onboard 1394 : Other (Enabled)


ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series <--not clear if this is 2x512 = 1024 VRAM, butapparently must be 1GB

Logical/Chipset Memory Banks
Total Memory : 512MB DDR3
Memory Bus Speed : 2x 400MHz (800MHz)
Minimum/Maximum/Turbo Speed : 2x 250MHz (500MHz) - 2x 500MHz (1GHz)
Channels : 4
Width : 32-bit
Maximum Memory Bus Bandwidth : 12.5GB/s

Direct3D 11 Device(s)
Interface Version : 10.01
CS - Compute Shader Support : No
DP - Double (Floating-Point) Support : No
Model : ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series
Physical Memory : 1GB
Texture Memory : 1.24GB <<--not sure why Texture memory exceeds 1024 MB, but not a concern of mine

Direct3D 10 Device(s)
Interface Version : 10.01
Library Version : 8.17.10.1129
Model : ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series
Physical Memory : 1GB
Texture Memory : 1.24GB


Question: I have a Gigabyte motherboard with a Intel 2 quad Q8300 cpu & do I need to delete drivers before I install a new Radeon HD 6870 graffics card ? I'm also going to upgrade the PSU to a Seasonic 520 Watt modular unit.Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

Answer: No, you should not delete the drivers for your on-board graphics (ever). Just install the graphics card, boot up your system with the monitor attached to the card. Windows will boot using basic VGA drivers. Go to AMD.com, download and install the latest drivers for your system. Reboot once more and you should be good to go.

 

[Paul]

I thought I had this figured out, but I guess not.

I have 4 GM RAM, two sticks, for my Intel i5 machine running 32-bit Windows 7. I have a video card by ATI Radeon that has (I think, pretty sure) 1 GB Video RAM. I don't think I have on-board video graphics card (Intel integrated graphics card) in any way disabled in BIOS (there may or may not be a setting for this, but I kept it at default which means it's probably on). I think the OS is smart enough to know that when I am using the Radeon video card, it should ignore the onboard integrated graphics card, but for reasons explained below it probably does not matter.

So Physical Memory is 3061 says Windows Task Manager, since, I think (after surfing the net for about a half hour and seeing what looks like conflicting information), what happens is that your VRAM is subtracted from your 4 GB system memory RAM, so 4-1 = 3 GB (rounding).

Therefore, if I buy a 2 GB Video RAM Card (I did not even realize they make these, but gamers use them), on this system, my available RAM (Physical Memory) would be 4-2 = 2GB, correct? Not that I plan to do so, just curious.

In any event, since I don't do any heavy duty graphics, I don't care about video too much, but am wondering, short of upgrading to 64-bit (which I would never do, too much hassle), if there's any way to increase the system RAM to something closer to the 4 GB limit for 32-bit OS Win 7? I think (and hope) the answer is "no"--unless I'm some sort of hard core overclocker which I'm not. Under MSConfig.exe "Boot Advanced Options" there is a checkbox "Maximum Memory" but I don't want to touch that (it's unchecked at the moment) for reasons I read about 20 minutes ago but have since forgotten, however, my intuition tells me not to go there.

RL

Info from various screen scrapes and my system

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/978610


My system according to SiSoft diagnostics:

On-board Devices
Onboard IGD : Video Adapter (Enabled) <--does disabling this free up RAM if I have a video card? Apparently not.
Onboard LAN : Ethernet Adapter (Enabled)
Onboard 1394 : Other (Enabled)


ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series <--not clear if this is 2x512 = 1024 VRAM, but apparently must be 1GB

Logical/Chipset Memory Banks
Total Memory : 512MB DDR3
Memory Bus Speed : 2x 400MHz (800MHz)
Minimum/Maximum/Turbo Speed : 2x 250MHz (500MHz) - 2x 500MHz (1GHz)
Channels : 4
Width : 32-bit
Maximum Memory Bus Bandwidth : 12.5GB/s

Direct3D 11 Device(s)
Interface Version : 10.01
CS - Compute Shader Support : No
DP - Double (Floating-Point) Support : No
Model : ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series
Physical Memory : 1GB
Texture Memory : 1.24GB <<--not sure why Texture memory exceeds 1024 MB, but not a concern of mine

Direct3D 10 Device(s)
Interface Version : 10.01
Library Version : 8.17.10.1129
Model : ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series
Physical Memory : 1GB
Texture Memory : 1.24GB


Question: I have a Gigabyte motherboard with a Intel 2 quad Q8300 cpu & do I need to delete drivers before I install a new Radeon HD 6870 graffics card ? I'm also going to upgrade the PSU to a Seasonic 520 Watt modular unit.Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

Answer: No, you should not delete the drivers for your on-board graphics (ever). Just install the graphics card, boot up your system with the monitor attached to the card. Windows will boot using basic VGA drivers. Go to AMD.com, download and install the latest drivers for your system. Reboot once more and you should be good to go.

The limitation in Windows, is "by license".

There is effectively a memory license.

The math involves working out an address space.

The system bus address space, comes out of your 4GB space.
It's allocated in 256MB chunks. So if you install a PCI card,
it needs 1 byte of RAM, you lose 256MB right away. If several
PCI cards need 257MB total, then the BIOS rounds up to a
512MB allocation. And this means, even if the video cards
"go to zero", you still could not get exactly 4GB.

As you describe above, the video cards subtract. And they
subtract, because the RAM on the video card, needs to be
addressed for one of the operating modes of the hardware.
If you buy a 2GB video card, you would lose 1GB more than with
the 1GB card you have now.

The Intel graphics can use memory. You would check the BIOS,
to see what settings are available. On some hardware, there
was actually no "disable" option at all. And a user would
dial down the static allocation to 32MB or so, and that would
be about the best you could do.

Some Intel processors, don't have that GPU, while others do.
If the GPU is missing, it would be pretty strange for the
BIOS to allocate memory to it. When it's missing, Plug and
Play at the BIOS level, tell it not to bother.

The integrated graphics can have both a static and a
dynamic allocation. In some cases, over a gigabyte of
system RAM can be allocated to the Intel GPU during
game play. The memory is given back to the system
when the game exits. So that's not quite as
critical to your math. But if the hardware uses a
static allocation, you'd adjust that as your OS
needs suggest. If all the static allocation
is being used for, is for a few frame buffers
(triple buffering), then you wouldn't really need
that much. The next size up, might be 128MB for
Aero and compositing. Perhaps that could be
done with a dynamic allocation. I'm not really sure
of the details at that level. In any case, I think
you can play with the BIOS settings, and reduce the
wasted system memory.

My system reports 3144748K and I have a 512MB video card.
That's 3071MB. 4096-3071 = 1025. About 1MB is used for
things like the 640K BIOS. That brings it to 1024. My
video card, subtract 512MB, leaving 512MB wasted on two
system busses. So then the question would be, why is it
using two chunks. Is it really treated as two bus
segments or sometbing ? Don't know. All I can say is,
now that the baseline behavior is known, if I switched
to a larger video card, the math will make it easy
to predict the result. A 2GB video card, wouldn't
leave me with very much.

A 64 bit OS, gives it all back to you, except for
that 1MB thing. Come to think of it, I've never
bothered to check that. I have Windows 8 I could
use for a test.

Paul

 

[Yousuf Khan]

I thought I had this figured out, but I guess not.

I have 4 GM RAM, two sticks, for my Intel i5 machine running 32-bit
Windows 7. I have a video card by ATI Radeon that has (I think,
pretty sure) 1 GB Video RAM. I don't think I have on-board video
graphics card (Intel integrated graphics card) in any way disabled in
BIOS (there may or may not be a setting for this, but I kept it at
default which means it's probably on). I think the OS is smart
enough to know that when I am using the Radeon video card, it should
ignore the onboard integrated graphics card, but for reasons
explained below it probably does not matter.

So Physical Memory is 3061 says Windows Task Manager, since, I think
(after surfing the net for about a half hour and seeing what looks
like conflicting information), what happens is that your VRAM is
subtracted from your 4 GB system memory RAM, so 4-1 = 3 GB
(rounding).

Therefore, if I buy a 2 GB Video RAM Card (I did not even realize
they make these, but gamers use them), on this system, my available
RAM (Physical Memory) would be 4-2 = 2GB, correct? Not that I plan
to do so, just curious.

First of all, the reserved RAM is not just composed of your video card
memory space. Other peripherals that need direct access to memory, such
as network cards, could reserve some space in here too. Also the Windows
OS itself uses some of this.

Second of all, since you're asking about video memory, you should know
that not all of the graphics card's RAM is going to be visible to the
system at the same time. Some graphics cards these days can have 8GB of
RAM, which would be larger than a 32-bit system's entire addressable
limit. However, these graphics cards present their memory to the system
address space in small chunks known as an aperture window, AGP aperture,
video aperture or aperture size, etc. Even with PCI-E video cards the
same concept can still apply. What happens is that no matter how large
your GPU RAM is, it will be presented to your system in a fixed size,
such as 64MB, 128MB, 256MB, etc. The video driver will know the size of
the GPU's RAM, and the aperature window of the system RAM, and it'll
slide the GPU's RAM into view of the system, within the fixed window. So
the entire 8GB of GPU RAM will slide in and out of view of the system by
that 64/128/256MB/etc. at a time.

In a 64-bit system, you wouldn't need to use an aperture, as the whole
GPU RAM could be mapped into the system space with no problems.

Yousuf Khan

 

[RayLopez99]

On Tuesday, December 17, 2013 2:34:38 PM UTC+8, Yousuf Khan wrote:

[amazing stuff on aperture]

That was very informative, thanks.

I note on Amazon the 8 to 12 GB video cards cost $4-6k each--why? Is it bitcoin mining that's driving the prices of these cards to such high levels? I would think so.

RL

Here is an example: http://www.amazon.com/NVIDIA-900-52055-0020-000-GRID-Graphics-Card/dp/B00CA5MLCS

Nvidia Quadro K6000 12GB GDDR5 PCIe 3.0 x16 GPU Kepler Graphics Processing Unit Video Adapter 900-52081-0050-000 699-52081-0500-200
by nVidia
Be the first to review this item
Price: $4,799.00
Only 1 left in stock.
Ships from and sold by Compeve.
Ordering for Christmas? Based on the shipping schedule of Compeve, choose Expedited at checkout for delivery by December 24. See Compeve shipping details.
Memory: 12GB GDDR5 384-bit
Graphic bus: PCIe 3.0 x16
NVIDIA CUDA Parallel Processor Cores: 2880
Display connectors: DVI-I, DVI-D, 2x DP
3 new from $4,700.00

 

[Flasherly]

I note on Amazon the 8 to 12 GB video cards cost $4-6k each--why? Is
it bitcoin mining that's driving the prices of these cards to such
high levels? I would think so.

-
Vidboards are becoming increasingly obsolete, I think, taking the
place of various niche marketing for PCs doubling or augmented as for
what dedicated game boxes perhaps otherwise need connotate. Although
there was a period known as the 'Make or Break 'Em,' placed by terms
of pre-assembled, brandname PCs (HP, Dell, et al), that comported
ability to broadly engineer a PC accounted a focus on playing games
from a core business appeal to subseqent vendor outlet's ability to
successfully market PCs;- that was then eclipsed by core industrial
terms by marketing abstracts which, to the best of my knowledge, still
maintain a broadest MB base (along with recent core CPU support
subsequent for video, as provided by both Intel/AMD), (sic) given
provision for direct onboard video chipset support, as is presently
carried voer a brunt of marketing within MB appeal and supportive
sales, regardless of such provisions for PCI-E to then pretty much
relegated is absolute terms, for video cards that are now niche items
concerning a fringe entertainment purposes, which, ipso facto, cannot
seriously purport to be within the greater relm of processing
abilities computers generally have to impact.

 

[Paul]

On Tuesday, December 17, 2013 2:34:38 PM UTC+8, Yousuf Khan wrote:

[amazing stuff on aperture]

That was very informative, thanks.

I note on Amazon the 8 to 12 GB video cards cost $4-6k each--why? Is it bitcoin mining that's driving the prices of these cards to such high levels? I would think so.

RL

Here is an example: http://www.amazon.com/NVIDIA-900-52055-0020-000-GRID-Graphics-Card/dp/B00CA5MLCS

Nvidia Quadro K6000 12GB GDDR5 PCIe 3.0 x16 GPU Kepler Graphics Processing Unit Video Adapter 900-52081-0050-000 699-52081-0500-200
by nVidia
Be the first to review this item
Price: $4,799.00
Only 1 left in stock.
Ships from and sold by Compeve.
Ordering for Christmas? Based on the shipping schedule of Compeve, choose Expedited at checkout for delivery by December 24. See Compeve shipping details.
Memory: 12GB GDDR5 384-bit
Graphic bus: PCIe 3.0 x16
NVIDIA CUDA Parallel Processor Cores: 2880
Display connectors: DVI-I, DVI-D, 2x DP
3 new from $4,700.00

NVidia cards are piss-poor for BitCoin mining.

There is the equivalent of some arithmetic function (bit_shift ???)
that BitCoin needs, that is not present on the NVidia cards.
If you check the BitCoin ratings page for cards, it doesn't
really matter what NVidia card you select, it does poorly.

As a result of the accident of ATI supporting a necessary
(more efficient) way of doing it, BitCoin runs better on ATI.
And I don't think it's a coding issue, as those guys would
love to extend the "useful card" list, so more cheap cards
could be uncovered.

It turns out, BitCoin isn't a big user of video card
memory, so selecting a "large" card would be totally unnecessary.
BitCoin is doing math in parallel, the same calc over and
over again, kinda like "cracking a password". Some mid-range
cards actually turned out to the most cost effective, and
it actually drives up the used price for those cards on Ebay,
because they all end up in mining rigs.

BitCoin also doesn't use a lot of bus bandwidth, so you
might be able to connect a video card via a x1 slot.

And nobody doing serious mining, will be using video cards
for long, as there is a new generation of FPGA or custom
silicon out there, which will crush video cards (in the sense,
of not wasting electricity). There is a box now, with a number
of chips in it, selling for $35000, which will be shipping soon.
And that should cause the percentage of mined coins from
video cards, to drop. Just a matter of finding $35000
in your "loose change drawer"

*******

The above Kepler is a compute engine. It runs GPGPU code.
The buyer, buys one of those, so the entire problem
can be loaded into GPU memory. Apparently, the "fully enabled"
cards, such as the one above, have a caching scheme, to
try to reduce the latency of access to the video memory.
And that's important when solving problems with one of
those cards. Also, those cards would have more FP64 units
available, which are also a valued commodity inside the GPU.
I think there are more FP32, and they're not as nice for math.
Retail cards for gamers, the FP64 ratio is poor. Anandtech
probably has some articles, if you're interested.

And I have no idea, what problem space, justifies a $4700 card.
While scientists love stuff like that, they can't usually
afford the cash. Maybe the NSA is analysing your email
with one of those, for naughty words.

Paul

 

[hp]

[amazing stuff on aperture]

That was very informative, thanks.

I note on Amazon the 8 to 12 GB video cards cost $4-6k each--why? Is
it bitcoin mining that's driving the prices of these cards to such
high levels? I would think so.

Here is an example:
http://www.amazon.com/NVIDIA-900-52055-0020-000-GRID-Graphics-Card/dp/B00CA5MLCS

Nvidia Quadro K6000 12GB GDDR5 PCIe 3.0 x16 GPU Kepler Graphics
Processing Unit Video Adapter 900-52081-0050-000 699-52081-0500-200

by nVidia Be the first to review this item Price: $4,799.00 Only 1
left in stock. Ships from and sold by Compeve. Ordering for
Christmas? Based on the shipping schedule of Compeve, choose
Expedited at checkout for delivery by December 24. See Compeve
shipping details. Memory: 12GB GDDR5 384-bit Graphic bus: PCIe 3.0
x16 NVIDIA CUDA Parallel Processor Cores: 2880 Display connectors:
DVI-I, DVI-D, 2x DP 3 new from $4,700.00

Were Not these cards primarily intended for almost real time rendering
of video content??
Like maybe used for video projects for digital effects?

 

[bruce56]

Question: I have a Gigabyte motherboard with a Intel 2 quad Q8300 cpu & do I need to delete drivers before I install a new Radeon HD 6870 graffics card ? I'm also going to upgrade the PSU to a Seasonic 520 Watt modular unit..Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

If you lookup the Intel technical documents for Bearlake chipset (probably what
you have for Q8300 CPU), Reserved memory is a multiple of 64 MiB and at least
512 MiB. The operating system does not matter.
Almost every mainboard I have from that LGA775 era shows 768 MiB reserved,
so 3 and a quarter GiB of useable RAM with 4 GiB plugged in.

 

[Yousuf Khan]

On Tuesday, December 17, 2013 2:34:38 PM UTC+8, Yousuf Khan wrote:

[amazing stuff on aperture]

That was very informative, thanks.

I note on Amazon the 8 to 12 GB video cards cost $4-6k each--why? Is it bitcoin mining that's driving the prices of these cards to such high levels? I would think so.

RL

No, I don't think cryptocurrencies are really as popular as the media is
trying to make them sound to be. These are professional GPU's, used in
workstations and servers mainly for calculations rather than videos.

Yousuf Khan