[Discuss] Conflicting Information Regarding Video Memory

[epp at mcom.com (epp at mcom.com)]

On Sun, 11 Oct 2020 11:55:37 -0400
Dan Ritter <dsr at randomstring.org> wrote:

> You can allocate up to 768MB of RAM via BIOS options. This
> affects the complexity of the graphics that can be rendered but
> doesn't affect the speed very much.
> 
> The motherboard *should* have a PCIe2.0 x16 slot available for a
> better graphics card. If so, you can get a new-in-box Radeon
> 5450 for about $50 US, which will be roughly 3x faster and use
> its own RAM instead of the main RAM.
> 
> -dsr-

Thanks for the reply. 

It's an HP (Compaq) CQ5826, it only has two open x1 slots on the
motherboard. There are no memory settings in the BIOS.

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c03054469

A Radeon 5450 is what I bought for the other desktop (also an
HP/Compaq), which has x1, x16 and legacy PCI slots, despite
being two years /older/ than the CQ5826. That has an on-board NVIDIA
GPU which has caused issues with Linux, it would crash if I used
certain desktop environments. With the new Radeon card in that, it now
runs like a brand new machine.