get the benefit of having good batt life #s when in reality the consumer buying that laptop would never see that?
THE HOBBIT PC 2003 INTEL GMA 950 PATCH
I steer folks to ABS when I can (same outfit as Newegg).If consumers can't get the patch yet, then why are you testing w/ it? Why should intel/m$/hp etc. There are a number of mid-priced discrete video options for laptops, especially if buyers will ignore the largest brand names' products. For that, Intel recently started making the "3000" and "X3000" IGPs. None of these are likely to be certified for Vista's "Aero", and I doubt that the Intel chip ever could be. Of the three, only the ATI makes much of an attempt to provide a playable game platform (even though both the Xpress chip and Nforce chip both have the T&L that Intel omits from the 950). As such, all use main system RAM for video, which is slower than a separate card. All are buried within one or the other of the two ASICs that make up the chipset, as an integrated silicon core (IGP). All three of those named do include hardware-based shading. Intel's 950 still omits T&L, which must be added in software, slowing it down a great deal more. The ATI version seems to be the best of the three. I say that as long as gaming is not a deciding factor, go integrated instead of discrete.
THE HOBBIT PC 2003 INTEL GMA 950 UPGRADE
Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor has no i ssues with the 950 either. Luxor runs fine, a 3D Chess game runs fine, Virtual Pool 3 ran OK but not as well as on an older laptop with a GForce2GO card. I loaded Thief on the machine to see how it would run.it was certainly playable, though effects had turned down a bit. I game a bit still, but prefer to do that on a dedicated desktop system with x1900xt goodness.Ībout the only thing that you might miss with the 950 is digital vibrance or whatever equivalent ATI has. I play DVDs on the machine, they run as expected. Your two reasons for shying away from discrete graphics solutions were my primary reasons.lower cost but more importantly increased portability via less poweer draw leading to longer battery life. Recently bought a new laptop for business use.and I have the GMA950 in a xps m1210 with the T2300 and a gig o' 667MHzRAM. I'm shying away from the discrete GPU world for two reasons - price, and portability. The GMA950 system would have a Core Duo 1.66GHz - the ATI and nVidia solutions would sport a Turion X2 1.6GHz.Īnyone who owns a GMA950, X1100, or Go6150 equipped laptop - please, chime in. nVidia means better Linux/BSD support, and theoretically it should be a strong performer - but benchmarks that I've found online show it as horribly lacking, even losing to the GMA950. It seems to be "decent" at gaming, and being an ATI means it has better game support than the Intel.Īs far as I can tell, this is a desktop 6100 integrated GPU. See "MacBook running games" pt1 and pt2 - albiet that's with a T2400 and 2GBs, but I don't plan on outfitting my rig with anything less than 1GB at the barest minimum.įrom what I've been able to tell, it's just an X200M with DDR2 support - which in turn is a cut-down X300. However, its behaviour of "offload shading onto the CPU" is made much better with the advent of Core Duo. We've all heard the jokes, so let's just get them out of the way. With that in mind, I'm looking at laptops with the aforementioned three video chipsets. I value portability as well, so I'm leaning towards integrated video to save battery life. I've been looking at several different laptops recently, and while I don't do much gaming anymore, I like the occasional low-end game (WC3, C&C Generals, EVE) so I'd like to be able to play on the go.
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