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Just gotten delivery of an SS56G-V3 and am going to throw in my Spinpoint 160Mb HDD and a very decent spec' Plextor DVD Burner, OS to be XP Pro with a few mods, and my question is one regards the RAM and VGA side of things...
I understand I can use DDR400 dual channel RAM only if onboard graphics are disabled, and I expect to be whacking in 2Gb by way of decent sticks. Technically I do not need a graphics card because I'm not gaming (I do design work mostly...) BUT if a VGA card is the route to freeing up full RAM capability then so be it - and the SiS graphics certainly aren't anything very special in the first place.
The idea is to ultimately run the OS without any paging file... forcing the RAM to handle the load in that regard and letting my (IDE) HDD benefit from not having the permanent continuous read/write page file operations... thus improving desirable read/write chores with the possible benefit of extending the HDD lifespan...
So what Grphx option is best? I don't want to cause overheating (CPU is already a 3Ghz Prescott) and I can happily live with something less than top rank - but what suggestions are there in this respect? I want to fit a card that doesn't cause me to have any additional system tray icons, doesn't have a fan, and which leaves the adjacent PCi slot usefully accessible.
Other than design work I use the web intensively, and quite often play DVD movies, and with this in mind I'm hoping for some useful suggestions from those of you who are more expert on graphics cards than myself - if that's not too much to ask!
I understand I can use DDR400 dual channel RAM only if onboard graphics are disabled, and I expect to be whacking in 2Gb by way of decent sticks. Technically I do not need a graphics card because I'm not gaming (I do design work mostly...) BUT if a VGA card is the route to freeing up full RAM capability then so be it - and the SiS graphics certainly aren't anything very special in the first place.
The idea is to ultimately run the OS without any paging file... forcing the RAM to handle the load in that regard and letting my (IDE) HDD benefit from not having the permanent continuous read/write page file operations... thus improving desirable read/write chores with the possible benefit of extending the HDD lifespan...
So what Grphx option is best? I don't want to cause overheating (CPU is already a 3Ghz Prescott) and I can happily live with something less than top rank - but what suggestions are there in this respect? I want to fit a card that doesn't cause me to have any additional system tray icons, doesn't have a fan, and which leaves the adjacent PCi slot usefully accessible.
Other than design work I use the web intensively, and quite often play DVD movies, and with this in mind I'm hoping for some useful suggestions from those of you who are more expert on graphics cards than myself - if that's not too much to ask!
