side band addressing

[XxervioCSO]

should this be enabled?? and what exactly does it do??

 

[Bucksnort]

sb produces an alternate conduit for offloading video data and instructions to the cpu from gpu. Now sb is enabled if your video card supports it and if the video driver does. Nvidia turns it on by default if the card supports it. It should be enabled. Fastwrites is the one that causes problems many times. Most people leave that disabled. If you want to see if you have sidebanding enabled then dl wcpuid and it will tell in the data screen by clicking on the chipset icon at top.
wcpuid

 

[Brian48]

SB is very overrated. With today's GPU's, you won't be missing anything with it turned off. The earlier GeForce series used to come with it disabled by default in the video card's BIOS, but I think they may have brought it back due to people whining about it.

What SB does is increase the number of memory addresses from 32 to 40. In a nutshell, it allows to the card to communicate and do more tasks simultaneously with the rest of the system. In theory, this should increase performance. In reality, it's insignificant in the real world.

 

[bandana163]

It was useful in the age of the first GeForce cards.

 

[Brian48]

Originally posted by: Vaerilis
It was useful in the age of the first GeForce cards.

No it wasn't. It was in the "age" for the first GeForce cards that the uselessness of SBA became blaringly apparant. Creative Lab's Annihilator SDR and DDR was the only early GeForce cards that didn't disabled SBA by default, and this was really just a marketing gimmick towards the enthusiast crowd. For nVidia, SBA died out with the TNT2. Even with the TNT series, the advantages of SBA are practically nil since the rest of the card is usually the bottleneck.