ATI Mobility Radeon 4570HD DELL STUDIO 1555

[Preston786]

Hey guys ! i just got my studio 15 with ah 4570 HD installed i was so psyched about this lap first one i would have with ah dedicated graphics card and when i got it my bubble was burst when i powered it on i ordered 3 Gigs of ram and when i went to check how much was available i saw only 2 Gigs
so....... i wondered where has the other 1 gone so i did some looking around an saw my beloved graphics card was using Hypermemory and had a total memory of 1788 MB so obviously i was like WTF an then i did some digging and discovered it was ah HYBRID X2 card meaning i had TWO graphics cards ... which my friends at dell conveniently left out so now i have an integrated card as well as a dedicated card this is supposed to help power saving as the integrated card takes care of normal everyday graphics needs and the dedicated card kicks in for gaming and other graphics intensive stuff  i haven't tested it out yet but i intend to an i will let you know what happens
So I'm hoping to get feedback from anyone who has had this problem or has any light to shed on the matter as well as people that may want to buy a laptop with a dedicated card an would be surprised by this

PS i tried using ATI tray tools to disable the hypermemory i got a black screen an alot of registry error messages so my advice is just leave it as it is  

[Spazosaurus]

Yes i've heard about this feature. It's brand new...as in a thing of the last couple months where there's a discreet part alongside a weak integrated Intel gma accelerator. Pretty neat if you ask me, a novel way of prolonging your battery life while being game friendly.

As for the hyper memory, your best bet would be to look in the bios for a setting where you can select the amount of system memory that will be used as graphics memory. I'm almost certain that they would have included this option.

[Nephilim]

thanks for this info looking at getting one of these myself. was going to increases mem to 4GB anyway, but i will know how much i actually have to work with now.

[Crixx_Creww]

it was first used in the uppity mac books
two cards two save power blah blah
but in the macs case i believe you had to manually switch between the two.
Dont know if its the same for the dells.

[W1nTry]

Did you check the CCC for a disable option?

[Preston786]

Ok i didnt realise anyone replied i wasn't emailed anyways thanks for all the replies i tried pretty much everything and there's no option in the bios.... i had a chat with dell tech support and well the guy tried to tell me its a software thing... he probably doesn't know or just didn't want to tell me i guess :S but apparently it is the hybrid crossfire (talked to a guy in the US who had one and he confirmed it) ....
Thing is it has a ati X1something integrated card plus the 4570 HD i just downloaded the new catalyst drivers to my desktop and when i transfer ill update on how it goes.
There is no way in the CCC to switch off the hypermemory or to control the amount of RAM it uses but with this new info i think ill just leave it as is, its really not slowing down performance cause this studio still runs like a champ i guess ill just add in more ram later i dunno if this new one supports it but the old one went up to 8 gigs and well it auto switches for gaming tested with nfs undercover i have to get a copy of Crysis to test [i deleted mine ]though but ive seen some vids on youtube it runs pretty well on medium settings
Anyways thanks again for the replies + interest guys its much appreciated

[Nephilim]

i going to research that 8 gig thing i not so sure it right, my buddy have a last gen studio and it only goes to 4

on a somewhat related note. anyone know if ATI drivers play nice with fedora now? or i still hadda use omega?

[Preston786]

http://www.dell.com/us/en/home/notebooks/laptop-studio-1555/pd.aspx?refid=laptop-studio-1555&s=dhs&cs=19&ref=lthp (click on the tech specs tab)
goes up to 8GB man depends on how you customize and where/how u purchase it...