Hello.
I have a rather old PC with an integrated graphics card. A few years back, I upgraded it with a "new" graphics card, a Nvidia Geforce 6200 PCI.
It seems to have been working fine this entire time, I've re-installed windows quite a few times and every time I install the drivers everything seems to work. However, I have a habit of not nessisarily always uninstalling the old drivers, which are the VIA/SG3 Unichrome IGP.
When my computer boots up, it displays the graphics card information before anything else, and wherever I go inside windows to view the specs, it displays the Nvidia graphics card information and like I said, it seems to be working just fine, although some games I think should work better than they run, especially since I recently installed 1GB of ram, bringing the physical total to 1GB and 512GB. I thought the 1GB of ram would really show a huge performance boost, and I've kinda been disappointed in that regard. My computer still freezes quite often and is still rather sluggish under most circumstances. I kinda messed up installing the ram and I actually ended up putting it in sideways and trying to start the PC but the ram didn't show up until eventually I figured out what I had been doing and put it in the right way and then it showed up under my system info. I don't think it messed anything up because I don't beleive I actually jammed the ram all the way into the slot backwards, I just thought it was in all the way and it wasn't and like I said the ram shows up in the bios/system info.
However, in the system info a small chunk of it is missing because of the integrated video, and that's mainly why I'm making this post. Just a few minutes ago, I realized that all these years I was missing an extra 64mg of ram because it was being devoted to the integrated graphics, even though I thought I had it disabled (I just assumed it was the typical required system memory for windows).
My Bios has an option to switch the default graphics (on-board/PCI, I have it switched to PCI) but it does not have an option to actually disable the on-board graphics. It does however have an option to switch the amount of ram that is used for the IG, with the options ranging between 8MB to 64MB. It has been on 'Auto' this whole time, which ended up being 64MB because I just changed it to 8MB and the extra ram has showed up in my system info.
My main question is, am I likely suffering a hit to my performance due to all this? I am unable to actually disable the dedicated integrated ram so I have it set to 8MB , I am actually using a PCI card with 256MB of actual video graphics ram. I have the VIA/Unichrome listed under Display Adapters in the Device Manager set to 'disabled' (Do not Use this Device) and I am about to uninstall it's drivers.
Am I doing all of this right? Should I be doing something different to get the best performance and did having the onboard video using 64MB of ram have an impact on my PC before I changed it?
Just to clarify, I have 1GB/512MB of ram, minus 8MB due to my BIOs dedicating it to shared memory which is actually being shared with nothing because I have the on-board graphics disabled, or at least disabled through Windows device manager and the BIOS set to PCI default. Graphics card is GeForce 6200 W/256 Video-Ram (or possibly 512MB, have to check.)
I know that's a lot to read but I'd really appreciate some feedback on this, Thanks a lot.
I have a rather old PC with an integrated graphics card. A few years back, I upgraded it with a "new" graphics card, a Nvidia Geforce 6200 PCI.
It seems to have been working fine this entire time, I've re-installed windows quite a few times and every time I install the drivers everything seems to work. However, I have a habit of not nessisarily always uninstalling the old drivers, which are the VIA/SG3 Unichrome IGP.
When my computer boots up, it displays the graphics card information before anything else, and wherever I go inside windows to view the specs, it displays the Nvidia graphics card information and like I said, it seems to be working just fine, although some games I think should work better than they run, especially since I recently installed 1GB of ram, bringing the physical total to 1GB and 512GB. I thought the 1GB of ram would really show a huge performance boost, and I've kinda been disappointed in that regard. My computer still freezes quite often and is still rather sluggish under most circumstances. I kinda messed up installing the ram and I actually ended up putting it in sideways and trying to start the PC but the ram didn't show up until eventually I figured out what I had been doing and put it in the right way and then it showed up under my system info. I don't think it messed anything up because I don't beleive I actually jammed the ram all the way into the slot backwards, I just thought it was in all the way and it wasn't and like I said the ram shows up in the bios/system info.
However, in the system info a small chunk of it is missing because of the integrated video, and that's mainly why I'm making this post. Just a few minutes ago, I realized that all these years I was missing an extra 64mg of ram because it was being devoted to the integrated graphics, even though I thought I had it disabled (I just assumed it was the typical required system memory for windows).
My Bios has an option to switch the default graphics (on-board/PCI, I have it switched to PCI) but it does not have an option to actually disable the on-board graphics. It does however have an option to switch the amount of ram that is used for the IG, with the options ranging between 8MB to 64MB. It has been on 'Auto' this whole time, which ended up being 64MB because I just changed it to 8MB and the extra ram has showed up in my system info.
My main question is, am I likely suffering a hit to my performance due to all this? I am unable to actually disable the dedicated integrated ram so I have it set to 8MB , I am actually using a PCI card with 256MB of actual video graphics ram. I have the VIA/Unichrome listed under Display Adapters in the Device Manager set to 'disabled' (Do not Use this Device) and I am about to uninstall it's drivers.
Am I doing all of this right? Should I be doing something different to get the best performance and did having the onboard video using 64MB of ram have an impact on my PC before I changed it?
Just to clarify, I have 1GB/512MB of ram, minus 8MB due to my BIOs dedicating it to shared memory which is actually being shared with nothing because I have the on-board graphics disabled, or at least disabled through Windows device manager and the BIOS set to PCI default. Graphics card is GeForce 6200 W/256 Video-Ram (or possibly 512MB, have to check.)
I know that's a lot to read but I'd really appreciate some feedback on this, Thanks a lot.