How do you determine if your video card is sharing memory resources from your RAM? Or better yet, when shopping for a new PC, how do you make sure that your PC-RAM memory is not being used by other hardware or peripherals?

Hi, When shopping for a new PC, just make sure the machine has a standalone (usually AGP) video card and not on board, or integrated. If it has a standalone card, the card will have its own memory and not have to rely on the system ram. If you are at a store, have them open the case and look. Or, read the specs before purchasing. Good luck.

Thanks, Ken. How do I determine if my present PC's have or don't have video cards that steal resources from main memory?

Look at the back of the case. Is your video card in the agp slot or pci slot? Or is it low down and in the mainboard? Another way is look at cmos. Is there a setting for video and does it give you memory assignment choices. The impact of shared video on ram is tiny. If you are concerned then add more memory.

On my primary PC (not networked) I have a HP Pavilion ran by a Pentium 4 CPU 2.0 Ghz w/512 Mg RAM, WinXP Home, ServPak-1. My video card is NVIDIA GeForce2 MX-200, Driver Ver1.4.6.2., located at 6 PCI Bus. Resources tab shows Memory ranges of EE000000-EEFFFFFF and F0000000-F7000000, with IRQ = 16, I/O Range - 03B0-03BB and 03C0-03DF, followed by another Memory Range = 000A0000-000BFFFF. Needless to say, it's all Greek to me. Does this sound like my video card is stealing resources from my memory?

I don't think there are any P4 boards that have GF2 Integrated, only AMD so it is a standalone card you have, likely AGP card. To determine for sure you could check in system in 'my computer' as you are running XP. Then look at the memory amount, if it states 512MB you have a standalone card, if it states 480MB you have an integrated graphics card which uses 32MB of system memory.

I agree with te above post, I don't know of any MB with a Geforce2 MX integrated video card. The nVIDIA chipsets are intended for AMD processors and they have a Geforce4 MX integrated video (and not all). Open the case to see that it actually has a video card. The memory ranges you see are usual for video cards, integrated or not. I'll try to explain them. > I/O Range - 03B0-03BB and 03C0-03DF Intel processors have a range of memory addresses intented to make I/O (so it can use the same instruction to write/read data from memory or peripherals, specific instructions not needed). This address is used by your processor to send/recieve data from your video card. Those addresses can change, but they are usually between 100 and 400 (Hex. numbers). > 000A0000-000BFFFF. Those are the addresses used to write to VGA video memory directly, A0000-AFFFF for VGA cards and B000-BFFF for CGA cards and monochrome adapters (if my memory doesn't cheat me). Those addresses are standard. > EE000000-EEFFFFFF and F0000000-F7000000 This is where your VGA BIOS code is located. Usually the BIOS is copied from slow ROM to faster RAM in those addresses to speed up programs that use those real mode rutines (only DOS real mode programs). You can disable 'Shadow BIOS RAM' or 'Shadow BIOS video RAM' in your BIOS. Those addresses can change with your VGA BIOS size and memory configuration but they are allways between 000C0000 and 000FF000, but seems that your system is using shadow RAM so your VGA BIOS is relocated to extended memory. > IRQ = 16 As you my guest this isn't a memory address but an interruption request, when your video cards wants to send info to your system it issues an interruption to signal that it has completed some work and wants to transfer some data. I Hope that this very simple explanation helps.