shared memory

[John McGregor]

>
>
>Can one assume that 'shared memory' implies that there is  an Intel  'Extreme 
>Graphic' chip set on the motherboard? Are there other chip sets that make use 
>of this shared memory?
>Is the amount of the shared memory depending  on the total installed RAM? 
>

There are basicly two types of motherboards -- integrated and 
non-integrated. In the integrated boards, video, sound, nics, modems are 
all included on the board itself rather than being separate add in pci 
cards et al.The chipsets for the motherboards can be made by various 
maunfacturers with the more common ones being Intel, SIS, Nvidia and 
ATI. The advantage to integrated boards is that they generally cost less 
as a total solution than a box that uses a non-integrated board.. The 
disadvantage is the memory that is shared with the video card. If the 
video card is slated to use <= 32MB, then the performance hit that you 
can expect in a 512 MB system will be negligible. If on the other hand 
the card is configured to use 128MB, the performance hit can be 
substantial, especially in graphics intensive applications.What may be 
confusing you is that a standard add in video card is supplied with its 
own memory chips and has no need to access system memory.

John

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