Increasing Dedicated RAM for Intel 4400 on 088DT1?

[TrickChicken]

Hello, forumers! My friend is having a problem increasing his amount of dedicated memory for his 4400 graphics. He has an i3 4170, and just wants to increase it for better performance and little games like CSGO and stuff. He has hunted through the BIOS, and can't find anything regarding RAM in chipset configs or advanced, where I told him to look. He has a Dell 088DT1 mobo, and he says that his system is sharing 4 GB of his total 8 he has of RAM. He is planning on getting a real card soon, but doesn't really have any [??$??(?? ?° ?? ?°??)??$??]. I can barely find anything about this mobo online, and he really wants to change some of his shared RAM into dedicated. If anyone knows how, please help out, I am able to supply pictures or download software as needed. Any other comments are appreciated too. Thank you!

 

[geofelt]

Dell usually limits the bios options to keep customers from screwing things up.
If you don't find the setting in the bios, you will not find it anywhere else.
4gb sounds like a maximum allocation anyway.
Shared means that is what can be allocated to graphics I think.

 

[bignastyid]

You cant increase the dedicated ram. You might be able to increase the shared ram, if available the setting will be in the bios. Adding more shared ram will not make the igpu any faster.

 

[TrickChicken]

Dell usually limits the bios options to keep customers from screwing things up.
If you don't find the setting in the bios, you will not find it anywhere else.
4gb sounds like a maximum allocation anyway.
Shared means that is what can be allocated to graphics I think.

So basically it doesn't matter if its shared or dedicated? If a game surpasses the dedicated amount, it'll tap into the shared?

 

[bignastyid]

The h4400 doesn't really have any dedicated vram its all shared from system ram.

 

[IInuyasha74]

I think your friend needs to investigate his system a littler further. Intel's HD graphics are limited to 2 GB of shared system memory. If your friend has 8 GB installed and is only seeing 4 GB, I'd have to assume either he has a 32-bit OS installed or one of the memory modules has stopped working.

Either way, don't worry about increasing the shared vRAM, because the games performance will be limited by the graphics chip itself, and increasing vRAM won't increase the performance. More vRAM only increases performance in situations where the PC needs to store more textures in the vRAM than the currently allocated amount. I.E., unless the game is attempting to store more than 2 GB of textures and not able to, which I am sure it isn't based on the game and hte settings you would need to use to have playable framerates with that graphics processor, then having more vRAM won't change anything in terms of performance. It may even reduce performance overall as the CPU will have less RAM to work with, which is a key reason why Intel caps shared vRAM at 2 GB, Intel knows there is no reason to have more than that. Most motherboard manufacturers limit it to 1 GB of shared vRAM for the same reason.