Graphic's card Ram

[thomson1968]

Could someone please advise ::::: -

Can you or not uprade the ram on your graphics card, I,E :-
I have a geforce 3 ti500 card, it has standard 64mb ram, can i change the ram for say 128mb ? If possible, where would I get or look for ram upgardes for graphics cards ?
Or is it only possible to overclock the original fitted ram to achieve more speed ????
:cheers: :cheers: :cheers: :cheers: :cheers: :cheers: :cheers:

[Beefy]

RAM chips aren't really made to be removed / changed on video cards, so an 'upgrade' isn't possible. The best you can do with the card is overclocking.

[XBoy]

That would be sweet though... AGP 8x cards w/ DIMM slots :cool: Slap 2 512's of DDR PC3200 and your set

[t00lb0x]

That would actually be a good idea, upgradable vid cards...but it would ruin the GFX card industry, instead of buying a new FX 5800 ULTRA you could buy a FX 5200 ULTRA and upgrade the ram, saving like $150-300 a card...

[Beefy]

Errr, no. Extra RAM on same video cards doesn't actually achieve a hell of a lot. If it did, don't you think they would have more RAM on the cards to start with? It's like a 64MB GF3 vs a 128MB GF3. At the same clock speed, there's no obvious difference in performance.

[t00lb0x]

really...then why wait for 256mb or ram instead of 128?

[Beefy]

Who said anything about waiting for that?

Unless, of course, the card itself is different. If a card has the ability to efficiently use 256MB of video memory, then go for it.

If you don't believe me, check out all the old comparisons of when the GF3s came out with different amounts of RAM. There's no reason why you would go with the one with more RAM.

[ZEROKOOL]

if there were a performance advantage by having an extra 64 meg they would make the card with 128 as a high end model to beging with....although a card with dimm slots dows sound good:), put a couple OZ 3700's or 4200's in there and ur good to go:)

[bigjackusa]

They used to make vid cards with ram sockets so you could add ram. I don't think they sold a lot of extra ram for them then. Adding sockets adds cost which is hard to justify for most manufacturers. Nowadays, with product cycles being so short, most people would rather put their money into a new card with a faster gpu and expanded feature set than upgrade the old one. The manufacturers would rather you bought a new one too. You don't see the equivilent of "longest lasting pickup truck on the road" ads for vid cards. As an aside, Creative once produced a soundcard with simm sockets for storimg MIDI samples.

[zeradul]

I'm still waiting for a PCI card that is nothing more than a RAM controller, and comes with software so that you can set it up as a RAM drive. I know extremely high traffic web servers have this, but I want one just to mess with...

And what's sweet about the idea is that it can be done with slow old ram, (cheap) and basically any ram you can get will be a ridiculously fast ram drive.

I personally wouldn't even care if I lost all the data when I shut the computer off. Just imagine, dropping some giant file into your ram drive, and then giving it to 12 people at once over a fibre network.... Sending to everyone at as fast as they can write, or more likely as fast as the fibre can handle.

[ZEROKOOL]

LOL, getting a bit offtopic huh, i wired a few 10gig/s networks in my CCNA career, and i seen a ramdrive once and would setup one up if i knew how, the only problem with that is ur systems bandwisdth would be ur limitation. ur giganet is slowed to about 175meg/second bue to bit/byte conversion and then its up to the mercy of ur bus to transfer the file on over, but 175meg/s sounds nice huh? ultra320 scsi's in a raid could actualy write/read faster then that

[zeradul]

Yes, I know BUS is eventually going to be the bottleneck, so how about a fibre network card with 512 megs of PC100 SD ram, on board!!

The ram could fit in at an angle, and be standard ram we all have lying around, and poof, now you're bottleneck is your fibre switch.