Crossfire Question - Only 512 MB Shown as Dedicated

Hi all...

My SO & I just got in our two M17s yesterday. We got them home last night & booted them up just fine - just started running all the necessary updates to get them running. We got the ones with the dual 512 MB Crossfire'd cards. We also have 64-bit Vista with 4 gigs of RAM.

I have a question about the Crossfire video setup. I've never worked with Crossfire or SLI before, so please forgive if this is an obvious question.

When I went into the advanced video properties via the desktop (right click on desktop~properties~settings~advanced - I think ), I noticed that only 512 MB was shown as dedicated video. They had set another 1.5 gigs as shared video.

Is this normal in a Crossfire setup?

When I went into the Device Manager to make sure both cards are there, they are both listed as working.

Any insights?

Thanks in advance!

 

seems normal to me.

 

So the second 512 MB Crossfire'd card is not considered "dedicated"? I guess I thought I would see 1 gig of dedicated video...so that is what is throwing me.

 

im pretty sure you do technically have 1gb of dedicated vram.
i could be wrong?

 

well yes, you do have 2x512mb=1024mb=1Gb of VRAM. but because both crossfire cards have 512mb, that's what's shown as dedicated VRAM. nothing to worry about as long as performance is good.

 

Ahhhhh - gotcha! Thanks!

We have yet to try gaming on them - we'll hopefully get everything installed & patched & get gaming this weekend, so we'll see about performance.

 

what whizzo said. SLI & Crossfire do not combine RAM.. they're cards running individually and each has it's own RAM. What you're seeing reported is the amount of RAM each has access to. As, they only share grafx processing tasks, but dont share each others RAM. So 1 + 1 = 1

 

Thanks everyone! I just wanted to make sure that all was well - we had a heck of a time getting these machines, and so I really didn't want to have problems right out of the box. Heh.