[ale] OT: Cheap Laptop w/o shared RAM

[hbbs at comcast.net]

Jim Kinney recently spoke to this in another thread.  In a shared-RAM system, video behavior has to make a two-way trip through the rest of the motherboard.  

Reason I care is that we're in the process of reallocating laptop hardware at the house and my daughter's Sims games, that now run on my old AMD64 laptop (one of the first you could get; I ran 64-bit Gentoo on it for a few years), need to go on some other laptop so the old one can go to school with her.  

When she's running Sims on my old laptop (it now has its original WinXP load back on it), the internal fans rail up and the air outlet on the back is like a hair dryer.  I'm not sure if I *ever* got the laptop to run that hard and if I did (gcc compile?), it sure didn't do it for that long.  And it has 64MB of dedicated video RAM and an ATI Radeon 9600.  My concern is that a modern laptop with shared video RAM won't be able to get out of its own way running Sims, at least based on my experience with what it's like to run it on a pretty darn decent, if long in the tooth, laptop.


 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "Jim Popovitch" <yahoo at jimpop.com>
> What are the advantages of having dedicated video ram?  What are the
> downsides to not having dedicated video ram?
> 
> Thx.
> 
> -Jim P.
> 
> 2008/11/19 Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com>:
> > I have not seen a dedicated video ram laptop under $500. Maybe an off-lease
> > or used one but not a new one. That feature seems to add about $200 to the
> > overall cost.
> >
> > On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 10:40 PM, Jeff Hubbs <hbbs at comcast.net> wrote:
> >>
> >> Does anyone make a sub-$500 laptop that doesn't use shared video RAM?
> >> One that can still be had with WinXP i.l.o. Vista would be preferable.
> >>
> >> - Jeff
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> >
> >
> > --
> > --
> > James P. Kinney III
> >
> >
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