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I've got an inspiron 17R SE 7720 - not important really, what I wanted to ask about was the graphics cards.

It has both HD 4000 and Nvidia GT650M with 2GB RAM.

It is hard to understand from reading the info on the web, how exactly all this works. I'm reading that it is not possible to completely disable the intel graphics because the physical ports belong to it. And that you can't turn this Optimus off.

I'm no gamer or Solidworks guy, I'm just a heavy multitasking desktop user. So I don't really need pumped up graphics. For me the bigger concern is the noise (right now I have most of my graphics programs running on the nvidia)... but the big question really, I mean... am I saving on system RAM by offloading a lot of stuff to nvidia (the defaults have intel do almost everything, except games but I don't play games so basically by default nvidia does almost nothing - so I reveresed that thinking that it would make the Intel use almost no system RAM... but now I'm wondering if it doesn't really matter... maybe Intel just allocates a big chunk and never changes it?

So my questions are, am I actually saving on RAM by Intel using less when most apps are running on the dedicated nvidia? Because, if it's not actually saving me any of my precious RAM then I might as well turn the nvidia off for almost all applications since this fairly constant fan noise is annoying.

And does anyone know how I can check how much RAM HD4000 is using?

I assume it uses system ram, .... OR does it share Nvidia's 2GB of RAM?

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  • With ProcessExplorer/ProcessHacker you can see the GPU Memory usage. Play a bit with the tools to get the answer you're looking for. Nov 26, 2014 at 16:47
  • cool, wasn't sure what you meant but I found it in process hacker just before I was about to uninstall it. There is a graph for GPU, strange that MS didn't put that in windows task manager.. I thouht they did a really good job with winodws task manager in windows 8. Seems my shared right now is double my GPU dedicated that's being used, but it's still only 190MB so that's not too bad. I was worried it would be eating a GB or more.
    – Mikey
    Nov 26, 2014 at 22:48
  • haha funny to watch it in action... I have a thumb button on my mouse that triggers a expose-like windows animation. I keep pressin it and the ram immediately jumps up by 30-40MB on both cards, and when I let go of the button and the animation stops it drops back down the previous RAM usage on both cards. Seems like I might as well probably turn off the nvidia completely or let it do its optimus default - which is almost nothing anyhow, so that my ears would have a more pleasant time with it being quieter around
    – Mikey
    Nov 26, 2014 at 22:56

1 Answer 1

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To answer your questions:

  1. Every OEM is free to configure Nvidia Optimus the way they see fit. On some models, it's even possible to completely disable Optimus alltogether in the system BIOS and select a specific GPU (common on workstation grade systems such as HP's Zbook series), where others do not allow adjusting Optimus setups from the BIOS. In such cases, you can either have outputs wired to either the Integrated Graphics ONLY OR wired to the discrete GPU, with the eDP -driven panel for the laptop being the only monitor powered by the Integrated GPU.

  2. Offloading programs to the NVIDIA GPU will markedly improve their performance, say games and rendering software such as the Adobe line of products. However, when in use, the discrete GPU will obviously consume more power and generate more heat. RAM usage depends on what a particular program does with it, and whether your computer is experiencing any form of anomaly such as memory leaks due to poorly written device drivers. Loads running on the Integrated Graphics, such as render, do take a portion of RAM for use as VRAM, but this is not something that should be of much concern in terms of utilization. What should concern you is whether you have dual-channel RAM. Integrated Graphics loves dual channel memory, and it can drastically impact performance in tasks such as video encoding (Intel QuickSync) and gameplay (if you use the IGP for that).

  3. To check for VRAM usage, use a utility such as GPU-Z or Mark Russinovich's sysinternals process explorer. Note that GPU-Z separates the fields, showing discrete and shared VRAM usage, whereas sysinternals' process explorer pools the total available graphics memory pool as one.

Hope this helps.

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  • thanks, I asked this a while ago but appreciate the info anyhow since I still use this laptop ) albeit its on steroids now) i7-3940XM CPU, 16GB RAM upgrade . I think this is the last laptop I'll ever be able to buy that I can upgrade the CPU and that has 2 2.5" drive bays :( I just wish I had a displayport output (my macbook from 5 years earlier had a mini-display port already) I also wish I had some other choice than NVIDIA, they constantly release beta drivers as stable.. had to uninstall the latest ones because my win10 taskbar was freezing like clockwork after installing them
    – Mikey
    Jun 26, 2017 at 7:29

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