SHARED VIDEO MEMORY ON HP 6735s

khulershaker

khulershaker

khulershaker

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377
Hi
Just need something clearing up if some one knows.
Laptop; HP 6735s; 64 bit dual core ATI processor & HD3200 video chip with 4 gb system memory aswell.
Its fine but I suddenly noticed that in task manager, only 2800 gb available
for the total physical memory. I have 64 bit Vista btw.
Checked it all out and nothing wrong, no missed settings in latest bios etc
so decided to ring HP to find out what the deal was.
Turns out the system is a shared architecture and 1408 mb is reserved for the video card. If the system bottlenecked the system can re allocate accordingly. Kind of accounts for missing memory.

Thats as far as I've got and I dont really know if I have been fobbed off or what.
I thought 64bit allowed the 4gb ram to be addressed in its entirity by the OS.
I was under the impression 32bit systems had all that going on with the video memory allocation when using 4gb. I have a XP 32bit system at work with 4gb ram and that reports 3.5gb physical memory available, beating my 64bit, eh?!!!
So my question is, is this possible, or have I been fobbed off?
Is there someway to force the 4gb to the OS as I want it?
If I upgraded would the system memory go up? ( spec says 8gb possible) overkill but use virtual machines a lot so kind of the more the better for me.
Any way thanks for any info you can provide even if i just have to get used to the idea of this shared architecture thing?
 
In this case the whole 32bit vs 64bit and memory addressing limits is a red herring.

You have 4GB of memory.

You have a graphics chipset which uses system memory.

If the memory is allocated to the graphics chipset then it will not show as Windows system memory as it is not currently available to be used as such. For example; if you had a laptop with 512MB of memory and 32MB of this was being used by a graphics chipset which shared memory with the system then you would only show 480MB of system memory in Windows.

Hence you will see 4GB - [ amount of memory graphics chipset is using ] as system memory. If you add more memory then the same will be true just the 4GB will change.

The amount of memory you say the graphics chipset is using seems high and I don't know why that is the case but I would not expect to see the whole memory available for the system. It may be adjustable at the bios level?
 
thanks for the headsup.
I triple checked bios and nothing seems to be there to adjust. I know on a different system I had enable a memory remap function to achieve 4gb etc.

Think might just have to put up with it.
So to be clear if I upgrade memory in the future the same video memory will be reserved but the system mem will go up. So in my case vista reports 1408 reserved for graphics. IF I say went 8gb I'd see 6.5 or near enough?? Cheers bro.:confused:
 
Usually with laptops and shared video memory theres an option either in the BIOS or the video card drivers to change the amount that is allocated...
 
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