Ati mobility X1400

Is the ati mobility x1400, 256mb on card, 256 shared from system RAM = 512mb or 128mb on board, 128 shared from system ram?

 

usually its 128mb on board/128mb shared (hypermemory)

 

i think there's more than one vesion, I seem to remeber there being X1400s with 512mb hypermemory which I guess is 128mb on vboard and 384mb shared.

 

There are no X1400s with more than 128MB of dedicated RAM, so anything over that is shared. The same goes for the GeForce Go7400.

 

I have a question reagarding the ATI X1400. Is there anyway that you can increase the amount of memory for the video card. I have 2 gig of ram on my E1505 and when I run System Requirements Lab while on Vista RC1, it tells me I have 137mb for my video card. Is there any way to increase this? What is going on with the shared memory? Any responses would be great!
Thanks

Dell E1505
Intel Core Duo T2400 @ 1.83GHz, 2GB Ram, 256 MB ATI Radeon Mobility X1400 Hypermemory, 80GB Hard Drive, Creative Sound Blaster 24bit USB, Windows XP Professional & Windows Vista RC1 (Dual Boot)

 

The card is only asking for as much system RAM as it thinks it needs, which is why you don't always have the full about available.

That being said, borrowed system ram doesn't perform nearly as well as the built in ram on your CPU (in this case 128MB). I don't know if it will affect your gaming as much as you think, but even then I believe the X1400 cannot use much more than 128MB effectively.

 

Ok great! With that being said, is there anyway to make the amount of borrowed system ram somewhat "permanent". You said the PC will only borrow as much as it thinks it needs. I notice my roomate has a Desktop with a 256mb video card, 2gig of ram. The ATI X1400 is 128mb dedicated, + 128mb shared? Would this explain why my games can't run on the same level? System Requirements Lab on XP says the X1400 has 256mb/Vista has 137. Also, can you use your systems BIOS to change the amount of ram shared with the GPU?
Thanks!

Dell E1505
Intel Core Duo T2400 @ 1.83GHz, 2GB Ram, 256 MB ATI Radeon Mobility X1400 Hypermemory, 80GB Hard Drive, Creative Sound Blaster 24bit USB, Windows XP Professional & Windows Vista RC1 (Dual Boot)

 

Your roommate's card may be 256MB, but it is completely different. Even if it is an x1400, it will still perform better than your card because desktop cards have more pixel pipelines and shaders, etc available, not to mention they are generally clocked higher. But more than likely, it is a stronger card. A 256MB x1900 will perform incredibly faster than a 256MB x1400 because the card itself is faster.

The reason you are having issues on Vista saying you only have 137MB is because Vista controls video memory itself rather than offloading that task to the video drivers. The new DirectX 9.0L used in Vista uses a new shared memory technique for all graphics cards (including those with only dedicated memory such as mine... Vista can allocated up to 256MB of system memory to my card allowing me to have 512MB total). Therefore, in XP, the drivers are allocating memory as needed, but are telling XP that you have 256 no matter what. Vista doesn't do that; it knows exactly how much video memory you have at all times.

That being said, I don't think there is a way to dedicate a certain amount of video memory to your card at all times, but I may be wrong. Maybe someone else can help better in those regards.

 

Great, thanks for the information. It definately helped me out. Also, when running System Requirements Lab while on Vista, it said I had Direct X 10. I'm assuming that came with Vista. Should that improve game performance in general?

Dell E1505
Intel Core Duo T2400 @ 1.83GHz, 2GB Ram, 256 MB ATI Radeon Mobility X1400 Hypermemory, 80GB Hard Drive, Creative Sound Blaster 24bit USB, Windows XP Professional & Windows Vista RC1 (Dual Boot)

 

While Vista ships with DX10, your card (as well as every other card currently out) cannot use DX10 because the hardware requirements are not there.

Because of that, all games under Vista will revert back to DX9 mode and use Vista's DX9.0L.

 

Great, thanks for the info!

Dell E1505
Intel Core Duo T2400 @ 1.83GHz, 2GB Ram, 256 MB ATI Radeon Mobility X1400 Hypermemory, 80GB Hard Drive, Creative Sound Blaster 24bit USB, Windows XP Professional & Windows Vista RC1 (Dual Boot)

 

New to site. Not sure how much I'll use it but I've been searching all over the net for ways to improve my shared ram. I prefer laptops but also don't want to have no battery life. Compromising is difficult and I want a machine that can handle any game I throw at it when plugged in and conserve power when unplugged.
That said- I've noticed several whopping increases in what Catalyst lists as my shared VRAM. First- when upgrading from xp to vista it went from 256 to 383. Not bad even if it's only 128 dedicated. However after several hours of tweaks it's now saying 885 megs of video ram.
The critical factor I have noticed is how much ram vista is using, whatever is left over is available to Catalyst, at least on my laptop.

Originally I used several sites to tweak which services to disable in services.msc and which to leave on. My chief goal there was to increase free ram and boot time. Trial and error. Make sure to keep a record of changes. When in doubt make one change at a time. Reboot. See if everything is working. That way you know what to re-enable. Vista has improved information so keep an eye on dependencies.

Next I scoured cnet and found Vista Manager. It's shareware (have to pay to use after 15 days), but I went through every step. Used the registry cleaner 5 times in a row to make sure I got everything, defragged it. Then defragged my HDD. Set some autokills on hung apps and used their slider to give me middle of the road performance/looks on my desktop. If I set it lower I was having a difficult time getting theme vista back up rather than theme classic. Still looks nice on a plain background. I also made windows side bar a desktop short cut and removed it from start up. Vista Manager also will help disable start up apps.

Oh, and that user access control I disabled a while back, also kicked windows defender. I recommend however that you disable warnings before disabling windows defender and windows firewall- took me a good 30 minutes to fix error msgs when I didn't. I use third party firewall,virus,spyware,etc and I'm the only person who uses this laptop so I'm not really worried and don't need them. UAC I'm sure is nice for people who don't add/remove software frequently.

Okay- well that wasn't good enough. I snagged AutoMz Ultimate from cnet as well. They have two options on how far you want to tweak. Make sure you select that you access the internet on your PC. Also make sure to do a good backup. They have basic and extreme, or similar terms to how much you want to boost performance. Basic gave me no problem so I tried extreme. At first I got BSOD (blue screen of death ... kinda defeats the point when I type it out)- but on reboot everything loading wonderfully and much faster.

I liked the MZ so also snagged Mz Ram Booster which gives some nice quick options for improving performance. Currently testing Mz CPU accelerator also, all done by the same guy.

My ram footprint was much lower after all this. (You may also try in Vista Manager listing less ram than you actually use). My flash readyboost was much smaller (good sign, since recommendation is based on how much mem vista is using- though not necessarily the 1.5x that was the rule of thumb in XP).

System stable with different games. Err, Guild Wars, The Movies, SimCity, Warcraft 3- haven't tried oblivion but I imagine it runs much nicer now. Ran before on the x1400 mobility.

Anyways, upgraded last to 2 gigs 667 mhz ddr2 ram. Great price like $80 on newegg atm for gskill. Doubt it will get any lower. Booted up, had to do setup cause of how bios configed after any changes- and voila Catalyst reports having 853-855 megs of video memory. Now, I haven't done any real benchmarking and didn't before hand. But since there was so much information lacking on this subject I thought I'd post what I got out of it. I must have tried 100 different google terms to try to find out if there's a registry setting vista uses, a modded laptop bios, or a vid bios flash that would do it for me. Things are running faster including games. I don't see DDR2 ram as much of a drawback, though I'm still AGP x800xt pe on my main PC. Games actually seem to be doing nicer on this laptop than the PC now.

Side effects, heat- Laptop is running hotter. I wish I could adjust in bios when to shut down after breaking a certain threshhold. I8kfanGUI is only software I've found for manually checking and impacting the Dell fan. You can turn it on full but it started making noises as if it was stressed and changing rotation speed often so haven't been using it. Still good way to check fans and RPM and turn fan on full temporarily if you need to cool laptop down. Unfortunately, the threshold for dell turning up fan is HIGHER THEN the threshold for throttling the CPU. Basically, the throttle is a cheap way to lower CPU temp- it'll make your CPU think it's at 100% running when really it is not. That slows down your apps, and being less demanding of the CPU cools it down. By doing it that way battery life is extended however you're hitting high temperatures. Sure they're spec'ed to run at 90+C' but I will mod a case with a sledge hammer if I have too ... I don't like anything running over 40'c Idle if I can help it. Long story short- fan doesn't come on high speed until your CPU is already running hot to conserve power, wish it was smart enough to say to itself- I'm plugged in now so I can run fan higher than when I'm not plugged in. The CPU throttle is really ticking me off and I'm more than looking forward to changing that once my warranty expires.

FYI speedfan is also a good app for telling temperatures,but the one I mentioned was only one I could find to force dell's fan on.

So yeah. Decrease a lot of the vista b.s. you don't need loading all the time. Kill the graphics and aero theme (you can always turn them on again and fyi it makes a substantial diff on batt life if you simply right click dsktop and change theme at same time you right click battery icon and select power saver).
Put windows sidebar as an icon on desktop you can launch rather than have it load up front.
Increase to best ram possible.
Try out the apps I listed (BACKUP! ... I did get a BSOD after doing the extreme performance option on AutoMz ultimate but after a good 24 reboots since then no problems.
And check CCC. If you limit what ram vista can use (and of course what it needs to run what you actually need it too), the rest will be given to your vid card (at least for me).
I'd still love to know the registry area that vista uses for shared video memory.

Err my specs currently are
E1505, Centrino core2 duo 2ghz (4meg 2ndlvl cache), x1400 mobility, HDD I should probably replace 5400 rpm and 8 megs cache- can't seem to find a S-ATA notebook drive with 7200 RPM and 16 megs cache. "note" I did have an increase in performance when running off a USB enclosure drive even before messing with trying to get my video ram shared up- however that drive died. Tempted to try one of the western digitial 7200 RPM firewire/USB 16 meg cache 360 gig+ external drives. Running standard full upgrade vista professional modded after the fact manually and with the apps I listed above.
-Hope this information ... and the length of it lol is useful to someone.

I've also gotten vista home basic to run on a 650 mhz p-3 with 288 megs of ram (32 on board). That was a mix of vLite and tears and stress- (especially over drivers). An old laptop I had around with a dead battery. Actually wasn't too bad. I tried with err.. 196 or so megs ram at first but that was a no go. Kept getting cache write errors. But yeah with time and effort you can get vista to run on 256 megs of ram. Laptop only had 8 megs vid ram too heh. Decade'ish old gateway solo. So, a lot of this stuff is possible if you're willing to make mistakes and spend some time with it. Gutting vista before hand with vlite will probably do more in long term than after the fact like I've described. It's your software, you can do whatever the @#$#@ you want with it so long as you're not redistributing/packaging/etc it. Got pissed at a guy in a store other day, was trying to be helpful and said he could use alcohol 52% to mount cd images so he wouldn't need to use the disk to play a game. Told me he didn't want to do anything illegal. Wish people would learn their damn rights. Just because some cali judge said it's illegal to market a product that removes/gets around copyprotection doesn't mean you're not allowed to do it yourself.
BTW my modded vista home basic install was nearly as fast as UBUNTU at booting, I'm sure if I had stuck with it I could have gotten it faster then ubuntu but my linux knowledge is primitive so no idea where to begin modding that.
hope this helps someone out there
peace
-dis

 

Dislexic the only legitimate way to increase your shared RAM is through the BIOS, if it is available for your to change.

I wouldn't recommend downloading relatively unknown software that "says" it will increase your memory capabilities, speed up your computer, remove spyware/make your computer faster, etc; because the opposite usually happens.

About Catalyst control center saying you have more shared video memory that is just an error of the catalyst control center. It happened to me as well, but by going to 'System Information' I was able to determine I had the same amount as in XP. 3dmark's system scan also determined this.

As for your computer getting hotter in general since you upgraded to vista, i'd say its likely because you need a bios update. Or a custom fan control software you have on your computer is interfering with the fan. Thats probably the reason why your CPU is throttling.

Finally, i'd suggest fixing that throttle problem before your warranty expires instead of after .