Video card memory

[NoctisReitop]

I was browsing newegg and I kept seeing cards that would say something along the lines of "512 mb memory (256 on board)". I called EVGA (for they had several cards that fit the aforementioned standard) and they told me a few things that I was a bit skeptical about. They said that these cards that are specificed as such are described as having (taking the quote for example) 256 mb of memory on the GPU itself, and having 256 mb "elsewhere" on the card (I asked where, he simply said elsewhere). He went on to say that due to the limits of engineering, 256 mb is the most that someone can put on a gpu alone and the rest on any other card is "elsewhere". I was under the impression that many cards had more than 256 mb on the GPU (especially 512, which isn't farfetched). He said that even the 8800GTX has only 256 on the GPU and the rest "elsewhere". So what's the story guys? The guy on the phone kind of sounded like a salesman and I was disinclined to take his word as truth. Here is an example of a card on newegg that has the quoted specs.

[One4yu2c]

I'm not sure what that rep was spouting, but the card you linked uses what's called TurboCache technology. TurboCache means it can use a portion of your system's RAM as a frame buffer in addition to the videocard's onboard RAM. The card you linked comes with 256MB GDDR2, and can use up to another 256MB from your system for 512MB total.

[NoctisReitop]

Heh, bastard. He claimed that there was another 256 mb ON the card and that there would be NO drawback to using one of these vs a 512 meg card. He even went as far as to claim that this type of memory management was BETTER than having a full fledged 512 card............. >= (

[One4yu2c]

Did you happen to get the rep's name?

[Sumgai]

I guess eVGA should lock up their offices so that the housekeeping staff doesn't answer the tech support lines.

[NoctisReitop]

I don't know. They guy didn't speak his name audibly enough for me to care. I suppose I should start getting their names, being I usually catch crap like this.

[Panda Man]

Heh, yeah it must have been the cleaning staff that told you this. eVGA is known to have some of the best customer tech support in their market (coming from what all I've heard, no personal experience with them).

Maybe the guy you called was really part of geek squad? :P

[Tyreal]

That is really weird... I'm not doubting you/your experience but I find it very strange that a eVGA rep would lie or try to fool a customer like that.

[halutzparilla]

are you sure you called eVga not the geek squad j/k
i always get peoples name specially those who concern my work, liability and jeopardy of license is at stake in it, so i carried the practice to my everyday routine...

tough luck for you, the one answered the call was the housekeeping department

[Stormcrow]

Haha, elsewhere. As Paul said, it's Turbocache (for Nvidia, ATI calls it Hypermemory). It's much crappier in performance then having an actual 512mb due to latency of waiting to access the system memory on top taking up valuable cache space. Also, there isn't any memory in the GPU. It's on the card itself surrounding the GPU, looks just system RAM chips. And trust us, the 8800GTX does have 768 on the card itself used just for the GPU.