Integrated Graphics Card

[Jaf]

Im not too advanced with the hardware side of computers, and was wondering if anyone could help me out.

I've bought a new pc and it comes with an integrated Geforce4 MX video card. Is it possible to remove this and buy a stand-alone graphics card. My pc comes with 512MB DDR RAM, but the video card uses 128MB of this memory, leaving me only with 384MB of RAM. If you can remove the card would the shared 128mb memory go bak to the 384mb and make it bak up to 512MB again.

Im grateful for any help

 

[Greeno]

Yep,

If you've got an AGP Port.. you could simply buy a better AGP card and stick it in, you would have to disable your on-board VGA though... but that will still free up your lost RAM.

Regards,

 

[Jaf]

Cheers Greeno

 

[NoisySilence]

If it is indeed a GF4MX as integrated GPU, it would seem you have a nforce2 board. The nforce1 integrated GPU was more at the level of a GF2MX.

As Greeno said, disabling the onboard VGA should allow you to recover the full amount of memory.

If you wish, you can always keep the onboard VGA , add a card on the AGP slot & setup a nice dualview system.

If you decide to do so, you might still want to lower the amount of Ram allocated to the onboard VGA. 128mb is too much if it's only gonna serve for 2D.

 

[Jaf]

not a bad idea NoisySilence

I think a dualview would be quite good

 

[Greeno]

It's a great idea, but speaking from experience of Intel boards/chipsets (which this prolly isn't) guessing you've gone AMD right?

anyway..when you plug an AGP card in, it simply kills the on-board VGA.. so if you plugged the VGA lead into the on-board port no matter how the BIOS was set, you'd get nothing.

Again, in windows, it wouldnt be an accessible device either, if an AGP card was present :]