Recently the manufacturers of video accelerators presented new lines of their products based on the hyper memory and turbo cash technologies. These technologies are similar in the method engaged, but they are used as trade marks by different companies, ATI and NVIDIA.
Basically the main idea of hyper memory and turbo cash is to use operating memory of the computer for the needs of video accelerator instead of integrated memory chips on accelerators themselves. This technology helps to substantially decrease the price of the video card on account of the absence of memory microchips.
The idea of using the operating memory for video accelerating is not revolutionary, but it gained new turn of development with the spreading of PCI-Express, as the connection between motherboard and video card. PCI-E provides significantly higher speed of data exchange between video card and computer system, what makes possible to use part of computer DDR memory for the needs of video accelerator. AGP slots, widely spread earlier and still being in use on many motherboards, can not ensure enough transfer speed; that is why hyper memory and turbo cash features work only on PCI-Express cards.
The significant advantage of new video cards with hyper memory or turbo cash is their price, but choosing the card to buy, you should keep in mind several important issues. First, if you are going to play modern games on your computer, it is more reasonable to buy a video card with an integrated memory chip, as it will provide much better speed in comparison with hyper memory. Second, to function efficiently, hyper memory or turbo cash video cards require at least 512 Mb of DDR memory, though the recommended level is 1 Gb. In this case, memory resources of the computer will be equally divided between the video card and other system components and services. Accordingly, if the computer is equipped with DDR less than 512 Mb, it is recommended to evaluate the choices: to buy additional DDR memory and less expensive video card with turbo cash or buy only a more expensive video card with integrated memory.
Moreover, it should also be noted that today another video solution exists, namely video chips integrated into motherboards, like GMA 900 or Radeon Xpress 200, which provide practically the same efficiency as video cards with hyper memory.
Choosing the video accelerator is the matter of personal preferences, needs and opportunities. The aim of this article was to present the new technology and the main principles, which can be helpful when choosing a video card.
In conclusion, it will be useful to name some models of video cards that incorporated these new technologies. They are ATI GeCube X300SSE and Saphire Radeon X300SE with hyper memory and NVIDIA Gigabyte GV-NX62TC256D and Leadtec Winfast PX6200TC with turbo cash. These models are worth paying attention at when looking for a video card, especially NVIDIA products, known for their good work efficiency and functionality.