Question regarding Intel processors and the VRAM pulled out of RAM

MountainGaurdian

MountainGaurdian

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I picked up a "new to me" computer a few weeks ago and old HP 500-205T with a Pegatron Memphis-S motherboard.

It currently has an i3-4160 Haswell 3.5 GHz Dual core 4 thread cpu in it.

Right now it only has 6 GB og RAM in it and it is pulling 3 GB out of that for VRAM added to the 1 GB on my old Radeon GPU.

On Intel's specs page the i3-4160 Haswell 3.5 GHz processor should only be putting 2 GB of Ram toward video memory. So how am I getting 3GB?

I bought an i5-4670 quad core four thread to replace this processor with along with 8 GB of memory. The 8 GB added to the 4 will give me 12 GB at the moment until I buy another 8 GB memory stick. I also bought a GeForce 1060 with 6 GB onboard memory.

The Intel specs page tells me that the i5-4670 also pulls a max of 2GB of RAM for VRAM the same as it says for the current processor which is pulling 3 GB of RAM from (6) installed for VRAM. As there are no settings in HP's ridiculously underpowered BIOS settings I am curious just how much VRAM the CPU is going pull from my RAM?

I mean 12 GB of VRAM would be a bit much and leave me a mere 6 GB for system memory at the rate I am seeing. Anyone understand why my current CPU is pulling 3GB instead of the 2GB Intel's specs page lists for it?

Will the new CPU do the same?

Will increasing the RAM memory increase the amount of VRAM?

Two gigs being pulled from the 12 gigs of RAM and added to the 6 gigs on the 1060 GPU would in itself be a bit ridiculous, but I see no options whatsoever where it comes to VRAM in BIOS settings. Is there a way to set this via the CPU/GPU itself?

Is it possible that DXDIAG might be reading the VRAM wrong? Looking at it right now it is reading 3798 GB, my old ATI Juniper XT video card only has 1GB of memory on it so the other 3GB (2798) has to be coming from installed RAM provided DXDIAG is reading this properly.

I will be going ahead and putting Win 10 Pro on this computer next week, it is currently Win 7 Pro, is there any way to set the VRAM through the Win 10 Pro OS?
 
TLDR; if it is eating up that much ram it sounds like an issue, suggest looking into the bios and scaling the amount down.
 
if you use a discrete GPU I would start by turning of the iGPU from the processor and see what that does.
 
It is not "using" the memory as I do not really do too much that is particularly gpu intensive generally. I was just reading that it is best to have twice the amount of system RAM as you have dedicated VRAM. With my 4 GB memorey and 8 GB memory I would have 12 GB system RAM and the 6 GB VRAM on the video card, which is about a perfect ratio. With a 1060 6GB GPU I do not need any system RAM being put towards VRAM.

Hell with "my" usage of "this" computer I really don't even need the 3 GB of system RAM that it is currently allocating to VRAM as the 1GB on my AMD GPU is enough to take care of anything I am doing at the moment. On past computers I was able to adjust the size of or even turn off VRAM being allocated from system RAM, but this BIOS has almost no settings in it.

If I was using the onboard GPU built into the CPU then I would need VRAM allocated to it from RAM, but as I will never be using the Intel GPU built in into the CPU and my new video card will have 6GB of VRAM on it, I see no reason to even allocate RAM to VRAM.

As for memory usage I have had no issues or problems with it as yet. I thought I would set this particular tower up with the capability of being able to continue to play some of the newer more graphically intensive games over the next few years. My kids are always trying to get me play games with them and my four old towers are getting tough to keep upgraded enough to hang on to any of the newer games, so I thought I would go ahead and upgrade a bit as my main tower that I use is now 12 years old. "My" computers might be used for medium to low core gaming about 1% of the time, so it isn't a great issue, I just like to be able to set things up the way I want and I am finding to my chagrin that I seem to have no control over this anymore unlike all of my past computer builds.
 
As for memory usage with the few internet tabs I have open and background programs running I am using 2.67 GB of RAM memory, as I stated I have no memory shortage issues as my computer is generally pretty minor for the most part. About the only time I ever challenge is when I am modding or programming with 3 screens of windows open and compiling etc. I use far more system memory generally than I use video memory. After I get done with the first round of upgrades on this computer I will go ahead and pick up a second 8 GB memory and jump up to 16 GB which will be decent enough for anything I am likely to do on this computer.

Whether it is a "problem" or "issue" or not I would still like to be able to control the memory allocation anyways.
 
Denpepe said:
if you use a discrete GPU I would start by turning of the iGPU from the processor and see what that does.
Click to expand...


As for the IGPU, it is automatically disabled when you plug a GPU into the PCI, yet the 3GB RAM is still allocated to VRAM. Now from what I understand system RAM comes first and foremost so if I used over 3GB of system RAM it would simply use more RAM for the system and less for VRAM so in the end I suppose other than the statement of an arbitrary static number showing up in DXDIAG it won't likely make any actual performance difference on my system. That is what I am reading anyways, though I do kind of wonder if that is the case why we have had the ability to set this value ourselves in past BIOS utilities.
 
Now to wait until all my parts show up to continue...... probably the toughest part of building something... lol... Time to do some more study on Win 10 and VRAM allocation I guess...
 
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