card with memory vs. onboard video?

[gujuguy007]

so i just bought a shuttle mn31L....the cool thing about this motherboard is that it has dual VGA Ports. There is a GeForce4 MX chip in it, but i was wondering if i should purchase a card with memory to replace the onboard video?

i have an older computer that has an old geforce mx 200 32mb card that seemed to work fine for me as i did a lot of digital editing but i will be handing that down to my parents. my new rig has 500 mb ram, but i was concerned about performance and speed because the memory would be shared. for just a couple of dollars this video card seems like a steal: PNY GeForce4 MX 440 / 64MB . Should I go for it? Any opinions would be appreciated.

 

[vshah]

get dual display pci card and have 4 monitors

 

[MercenaryForHire]

As long as you have dual-channel RAM (pair of two matched sticks) on that nForce2 board, you won't notice much difference in the general performance. Just set the framebuffer to 32MB - or even lower if you're not planning on gaming at all.

The IGP eats bandwidth like popcorn, so single-channel will make you suffer.

- M4H

 

[gujuguy007]

Originally posted by: MercenaryForHire
As long as you have dual-channel RAM (pair of two matched sticks) on that nForce2 board, you won't notice much difference in the general performance....

- M4H

By this you mean, I should just add another 512 stick of the same ram i have already or specifically get ram that is optimized for dual channel?

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Originally posted by: gujuguy007

Originally posted by: MercenaryForHire
As long as you have dual-channel RAM (pair of two matched sticks) on that nForce2 board, you won't notice much difference in the general performance....

- M4H

By this you mean, I should just add another 512 stick of the same ram i have already or specifically get ram that is optimized for dual channel?

Just add another stick of 512. Pretty much any quality RAM will run in dual-channel, and having a gig certainly won't hurt if you're editing video.

- M4H

 

[gujuguy007]

thanks..appreciate the help.