Why does installing NVidia 9600GT graphics card, take 1GB of RAM away from Windows?
- by Nick G
Hi,
I've changed graphics cards in my PC and now Windows 7 (32bit) is reporting that I have a whole gigabyte less physical RAM in my PC. Why is this?
Firstly, the machine has 4GB of physical RAM. The old card was an ATI 2600XT with 256MB and the new card is an NVidia 9600GT with 512MB.
With the ATI card windows sees 3326MB.
With the NVidia card, windows sees 2558MB.
I realise that due to address space restrictions I will not see all 4GB with 32bit windows, but why is there such a massive loss of RAM when simply changing cards (bearing in mind BOTH cards have their own RAM and borrow no main memory like some built on chipsets do). Would using 64 bit windows solve this?
Thanks
Nick.