Asus G1s with 8600M GT 256 or 512MB Vram?

Does the Asus only have 8600M GT with 256MB? It seems to be listed as such. Do you think this will cause a performace hit comparing it to the 512MB 8600Gt in the Zepto 6224W or others like that.

I know with the go7600 256MB or 512MB didnt make much differance. Does this apply to the 8600 series too?

 

I believe the G1S has 512 MB of VRAM. The 8600GT should be capable of using more than 256 MB, since the 8600GT is at least as powerful as the 7900GS.

 

That is what i was thinking too. But at milestonepc.com and some German sites I found it was listed with 256MB only

I dont think 256MB will be good anymore in 2 years. I have a older laptop with a Mobile ATI 9700 with 64MB. At the time everybody told me that benchmarks show that the 128Mb version of the 9700 has a performance gain of only 2-3%... But then newer games came out and the performance differance was 20% or more in games like Doom 3.

 

From what I hear it doesn't really matter. These cards are just not fast enough to make good use of 512MB. It's the same with the go7600. It's available with 256MB or 512MB, but the difference between them is pretty slim.

Yesterday I asked MilestonePC this question:
Furthermore, I saw that 8600m GT fitted on the G1s was one with 256MB memory, isn’t that suppose to be 512MB?

This is the answer I got:
The video memory is 256M dedicated and 256M sharing from the system memory.

 

Can you disable the 256M that is shared with the sys mem?

 

Usually not.But the memory will not be allocated until it is actually needed.
The reason behind this might be the little performance gain between 512MB dedicated and 256+256MB integrated+dedicated memory.

 

The official G1S video card is:

nVidia GeForce 8600M GT w/ 256MB
Turbo Cache 512MB
(DX10 Support)

 

Where did you get that from? The official Nvidia 8xxx introduction states a 512MB 8600m GT.

 

This info came directly from the ASUS Notebook Product Manager in the US.

 

Make sure there is no breech of the NDA.

 

Turbo Cache 512MB. what is that?

 

It means 256mb dedicated, with another 256 siphoned from your RAM.

 

ah ok, still don`t understand, what is siphoned?
having a notebook with Turbo Cache 512MB is good or bad?

 

What Coriolis is saying is the video card has 256MB dedicated on board (on the video card itself). When the system detects it needs extra video power it will pull another 256MB from the system Ram to boost it up to a total of 512MB. Turbo Cache is a good thing (Although having all dedicated is much better)

 

It's good and bad.. Having it's own dedicated ram will be faster read/write and not take anything away from system memory. But of course it can be good if the video card does only has 256MB dedicated, since it may need extra.


But with ram sticks getting bigger and cheaper it wont be much of an issue.. Especially if the notebooks can support 2GB sticks and 4GB total (and dual channel). Not sure if they can though.

 

Guys you want the 256mb card. Here is the issue. the 256MB card uses GDDR3 and the 512MB card uses GDDR2. Because GDDR3 is very mature, this should allow the board makers to pair it with 2.0-1.5NS ram which allows for more memory bandwidth. Because these cards are not 256bit memory buses, but 128bit bus, the faster memory will increase total bandwidth and this is much more important than an extra 256MB video ram.

 

Quoted for truth. If they cranked the bus to 256bit, it would allow the card to address more memory and thus make the larger amount actually feasible. Wasn't aware that the 512MB versions used GDDR2, but anything of the 7xxx generation and up should be on at least GDDR3.