Nvidia Quadro 140m shared RAM

I have 2GB of ram in my system. Is it possible to change my system to allocate say 512mb ram instead of 751mb for the GPU.

 

Your 140M uses system RAM on top of its dedicated? In reality there is no point trying to allocate more RAM for the GPU's use since you're already using system RAM. So in other words it's probably not possible and it would be pointless to do it anyway.

 

I believe it defaults to using shared RAM, so he is asking how to lower that.

 

Ooohhh I didn't look at the numbers. I still don't understand, why is your GPU using shared RAM? Are you sure you're interpreting it correctly?

 

Yes the Quadro has 128mb dedicated RAM on board. But of my 2GB system RAM, Vista is allocating an additional 751mb for the GPU's use. That gives me a total amount of 879mb accessible RAM for the GPU. Leaving me with only 1.3GB or so for CPU use, I want to raise this numer to 1.5 or so. I don't feel I need that much RAM for the GPU even playing games like HalfLife2 and F.E.A.R. I have already checked through the BIOS and didn't see an option. Any help would be appreciated.

 

Are we talking about the same thing? Are you sure that 751MB isn't RAM in use by Vista? How exactly do you know how much is allocated to your video card? How did you find this specific number out? Where did you look in Vista?

 

Simple really.

 

Thanks, that's much clearer. That's a good question, I didn't imagine the 140M would take up so much RAM. Is that RAM dynamically available to Vista to use or is it reserved for the video card? It would seem like something of a crime if your 140M was hogging almost a gig of RAM from your system.

 

I'm not entirely sure. Judging by the fact that at idle, 45% of my system RAM is in use, I am assuming that it's not instantaneously available to both CPU and GPU. Also from my experience in Windows, when the OS allocates RAM for the GPU, it is basically like that amount of ram doesn't exist for the CPU. I don't know if Vista handles this differently.

 

Now that I actually think about this... it says 'shared' memory, that would literally mean that the CPU and GPU can 'share' the RAM. So perhaps both can utilize it. Also, the only time Windows will reserve RAM for graphics is when you have an integrated chip that needs system RAM because it has none of its own so ignore the quoted text about that. But does anybody know if I can lower this number? *duh* *hits myself in the head

 

You might try eliminating your paging file and running a program that uses a lot of RAM. Then you can see if it uses the shared RAM alloted to the GPU.

 

Is there a setting in the BIOS that allows you to change the gpu/ram allocation?

 

No, I've checked. I hope Lenovo releases it in their next BIOS update. I realize that the RAM is accessible to both the CPU and GPU, but it's on a first come, first served basis, so I still want to lower this number. Does anybody know if this RAM allocation is handled in the driver file?

 

Besides this issue, what is your opinion of the Nvidia Quadro 140m I just ordered my T61 with that exact video card.

 

I love it for what I need it for. First of all my system is mainly for school so I don't need anything too powerful. But when I do want to play games, it handles modern games to my satisfaction. It can run CSS on high/some medium settings and get 150+ fps at high actions times. It runs Half Life2 decently as well, I can get 130+ fps on high/some medium settings. It is a nice all around gpu. From what I understand it's equivalent to an 8400 GT.

 

If you've looked yourself in all of the obvious places then it probably can't be done easily. Besides that the number of people who can answer difficult technical questions like that is very low. I asked the exact same question about the X3100 and no one knew. The people with technical knowledge like that are few are far between. Many of the people here can answer simple questions, but anything beyond that has a low probability of being answered.

I see a lot of very technical questions asked which require some in depth knowledge and they almost never get answered. Just recently there was someone asking how to turn the Thinklight on without using the Fn keys. That would involve knowing the function calls of the Thinkpad productivity suite which lol I don't think anyone knows.

I've been wanting to comment on specific technical questions like these because I see them asked a lot and the first thing that comes to mind is: "Oh man no one here knows and this guy is never going to get a good answer". It's always worth asking though.

 

Yeah the chip being used is nearly identical to the 8400. Lenovo uses GDDR3 for the card, so it is much faster than typical 8400 cards which use GDDR2.