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?