ATI xpress 1100 question

[Spc_Gunter]

Ok, I am very new to integrated video cards. I used to be very afraid of them(sarcastically). But about 5 months ago I bought this laptop with the xpress 1100 in it. I was surprised on how much of a leap technology had made in just a few years on how the integrated cards worked. Anyway, I know that they run off of the computers ram, or atleast that is what I have always thought. Well I have 2, 512 sticks in this laptop, and my video is at 128 mg. If I pull the 2, 512 sticks of ram and put in 2, 1gig sticks will that up my video ram? Its probably a stupid question, but I just really dont know, Its not going to disappoint me if It doesnt but If it does then I am going to try it. I am in Iraq right now, so a laptop is really the only choice you got for computer play, or I would just get a desktop and a pcie card. anyway, any ideas would be gratefully appreciated. Oh, and are there any ideas on optimizing this card at all, not just overclocking, but any tips on getting the most performance out of it. Thanks, SPC Gunter

[pt]

hi and welcome to the forums
a x1100 is decent, but not for gamming (at least 2 year old or newer games)
adn more than 128mb on it will prob make 0 difference, but the rest of the putter will enjoy the 2gb
for gaming a desktop is a must have
for optimizing i don't know much, you will have to wait for other posts

[mullered07]

whats the model of your laptop? whatever the max supported hypermemory or ati equivalent is thats all the ram you can allocate to it wether you have 1gb or 8gb if its max is 128mb then having 2gb wont make a difference. as for optimising it also there is not anything you can really do aside from oveclock it a little. that and just keep your system running optimaly, defrag your hdd regularly (once a week, find the best performance driver for your card and not run a lot of unneccesary background programs, for tips on tweaking and "slimming" down XP check this thread out Windows XP Optimization Thread

[Dippyskoodlez]

Originally Posted by Spc_Gunter

Ok, I am very new to integrated video cards. I used to be very afraid of them(sarcastically). But about 5 months ago I bought this laptop with the xpress 1100 in it. I was surprised on how much of a leap technology had made in just a few years on how the integrated cards worked. Anyway, I know that they run off of the computers ram, or atleast that is what I have always thought. Well I have 2, 512 sticks in this laptop, and my video is at 128 mg. If I pull the 2, 512 sticks of ram and put in 2, 1gig sticks will that up my video ram? Its probably a stupid question, but I just really dont know, Its not going to disappoint me if It doesnt but If it does then I am going to try it. I am in Iraq right now, so a laptop is really the only choice you got for computer play, or I would just get a desktop and a pcie card. anyway, any ideas would be gratefully appreciated. Oh, and are there any ideas on optimizing this card at all, not just overclocking, but any tips on getting the most performance out of it. Thanks, SPC Gunter

Set everything to absolute minimums to get the most of your IGP. The fillrates and shader counts on them are simply too low to make use of AA/AF and high resolution, sadly.

If you could specify the game, it would be a little easier to give specific tweaks and tuning advice

Bumping the overall memory of the system will provide the biggest improvement, especially with only a gig.

The bios may allow setting the memory to >128Mb but you won't be able to actually make use of textures that size with an IGP of that speed, so I would not adjust it above 128mb.

Good luck!

Originally Posted by mullered07

defrag your hdd regularly

I would suggest against defragging. It will make the common things you do slower.. and put extra stress on an already warm laptop drive.

it used to be a good thing, but now the OS is capable of managing itself... OS X actually gets significantly slower by "defragging" it.

[Wile E]

Originally Posted by Dippyskoodlez

I would suggest against defragging. It will make the common things you do slower.. and put extra stress on an already warm laptop drive.

it used to be a good thing, but now the OS is capable of managing itself... OS X actually gets significantly slower by "defragging" it.

Well, I can see where you are coming from on a heat standpoint. But defragging doesn't slow down Windows or OS X (well, depending on the program you use on OS X). While the OS may have no problem keeping track of all the fragments, the drive still has to work harder to access them. I've personally seen significant improvements by defragging a heavily fragmented drive. Especially with large file performance.

I should note that I use O&O Defrag on Windows, and an iDefrag boot disk on OS X.

[Dippyskoodlez]

Originally Posted by Wile E

Well, I can see where you are coming from on a heat standpoint. But defragging doesn't slow down Windows or OS X (well, depending on the program you use on OS X). While the OS may have no problem keeping track of all the fragments, the drive still has to work harder to access them. I've personally seen significant improvements by defragging a heavily fragmented drive. Especially with large file performance.

I should note that I use O&O Defrag on Windows, and an iDefrag boot disk on OS X.

No.

90% wrong.

Even apple says don't defrag OS X.

It purposefully moves files to certain locations, and defragging will corrupt that.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668

[Wile E]

Originally Posted by Dippyskoodlez

No.

100% wrong.

Even apple says don't defrag OS X.

It purposefully moves files.

Just because Apple says it, doesn't mean it's true. I get better performance by the occasional defrag, period. Again, just because the OS knows where the fragments are, doesn't mean that the hard drive doesn't have to work harder to retrieve a file scattered all over your hard drive. Plus iDefrag rebuilds all of OS X's indexes, so the OS doesn't have to. (Which is where the majority of OS X defraggers cause the performance loss.) This debate has raged on and on since OS X's debut. My computer responds better after a defrag. I'm just gonna leave it at that.

But still, you haven't accounted for Windows.

[Dippyskoodlez]

Originally Posted by Wile E

Just because Apple says it, doesn't mean it's true. I get better performance by the occasional defrag, period. Again, just because the OS knows where the fragments are, doesn't mean that the hard drive doesn't have to work harder to retrieve a file scattered all over your hard drive. Plus iDefrag rebuilds all of OS X's indexes, so the OS doesn't have to. (Which is where the majority of OS X defraggers cause the performance loss.) This debate has raged on and on since OS X's debut. My computer responds better after a defrag. I'm just gonna leave it at that.

But still, you haven't accounted for Windows.

Ok, it may help windows some, but I bet it'll start hurting when vista hits the streets a little harder

But OS X doesn't auto fill small spaces like windows does, so fragmentation is a lot lighter.

I've never seen a noticable difference with defragmenting anything these days.

Maybe I'll run a compario quick.

[Wile E]

Originally Posted by Dippyskoodlez

Ok, it may help windows some, but I bet it'll start hurting when vista hits the streets a little harder

But OS X doesn't auto fill small spaces like windows does, so fragmentation is a lot lighter.

I've never seen a noticable difference with defragmenting anything these days.

Maybe I'll run a compario quick.

I do have to admit that fragmentation is much less of a problem on OS X. I only defrag once every couple of months.

It seems I'm defragging Windows once a week. lol. (What? I install and uninstall a bunch of programs constantly, and download a lot of "linux" torrents. )

[kwchang007]

Originally Posted by Dippyskoodlez

Ok, it may help windows some, but I bet it'll start hurting when vista hits the streets a little harder

But OS X doesn't auto fill small spaces like windows does, so fragmentation is a lot lighter.

I've never seen a noticable difference with defragmenting anything these days.

Maybe I'll run a compario quick.

I have, when I moved like 13 gb of stuff from one place to another then defraged, there was a huge improvement. Not to mention a defraged pagefile is probably one of the best things you can do for a pagefile.

[Spc_Gunter]

Yeah, I would rather have my desktop here, but thats not an option. I have an acer aspire 5100, turion 64 1024 mg ram 120gigHD xpress 1100 ati with 128mg, Windows Vista. I know everyone is gonna reply back with, You need to get rid of vista, but I have my own arguments about that. As far as gaming, I have actually had alot of luck with pretty much every game aside from the newest that require Pixel shader 3.0. Which I dont have. I dont use AA/AF and I typically run games at 1024x768. I generally pull about 30 fps on most games, some games like Battlefield 2 will kinda drag it down sometimes. But i just make sure i keep the texture quality on a lower setting so i dont use up all my video mem. I dont know what my Vid card will max out at, as far as memory, thats why I was wondering if it would run it up to 256 by adding one more gig of ram. Thank you very much for the suggestions so far, I am waiting for anything else as well.

[Wile E]

Well, either way, you are better off with 2GB of ram. Even if you can't use any more for the IGP, if should still provide a nice boost in overall usability.

[Dippyskoodlez]

Originally Posted by Spc_Gunter

Yeah, I would rather have my desktop here, but thats not an option. I have an acer aspire 5100, turion 64 1024 mg ram 120gigHD xpress 1100 ati with 128mg, Windows Vista. I know everyone is gonna reply back with, You need to get rid of vista, but I have my own arguments about that. As far as gaming, I have actually had alot of luck with pretty much every game aside from the newest that require Pixel shader 3.0. Which I dont have. I dont use AA/AF and I typically run games at 1024x768. I generally pull about 30 fps on most games, some games like Battlefield 2 will kinda drag it down sometimes. But i just make sure i keep the texture quality on a lower setting so i dont use up all my video mem. I dont know what my Vid card will max out at, as far as memory, thats why I was wondering if it would run it up to 256 by adding one more gig of ram. Thank you very much for the suggestions so far, I am waiting for anything else as well.

You won't see any speed differences with greater than 128mb of memory, its simply not fast enough to handle it.