WTF is Shared System Memory?

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McMo0^

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Dec 21, 2007
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This is a PC Tech question to save people reading something they know nothing about

I'm not sure if i've posted in the right section, or if anyone can help me, but I'm stumped and Microsofts technobable is far to much for me on the best of days.

Spec:
Intel Q6600 2.44ghz
Nvidia 9800gt 512mb
Black Dragon Giel 800mhz 4Gb Ram
Vista Home Premium 32-bit

So i got 4gb with the intention of upgrading to 64bit with the release of win 7, so basically i'm only capable of using about 3gb atm. So i was kinda of freaked when randomly looking around my pc i noticed that that 1407mb was available for Shared System Memory leaving my Total Available Graphics Memory at 1919mb. Now my worry is that when i'm playing games, if i play something that is a little to much for my gfx, its going to rape me of half my ram. This is as far as i'm aware not going to help much for performance as gfx ram and motherboard ram are 2 completly different things, but running only 1.5 gig of ram during gameplay worries me on vista, as it could be reducing performance.

Does anyone have any insight as to whether this is ok, if theres anything that I can, or needs to be done about it? I've googled the question, but so far only found people quoting stuff from microsoft which doesn't really answer my question, or just saying that its ok to have all that ram thrown at your graphics card.

Help!
 

megalomania

New member
Apr 14, 2009
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You should be alright unless you are running Crysis on high end settings. Its rarely advisable to tinker with stuff like Shared System Memory because it can actually slow the computer down (you can inadvertently make it write more information to the Hard Drives which obviously slows things down a lot)

Also if you turn off Aero and are careful with the number of applications running in the background you might be able to drop that a bit, however Vista in notoriously RAM hungry so its perfectly normal for it to be taking 1.5Gig of your RAM before you even know about it.