Quote:
Originally Posted by DoubleF
There's laptops from 2010 with integrated cards that perform that poorly? Damn, fair enough.
I've been making sure my laptops have a decent dedicated card since the C2D days and have avoid integrated at all costs. I didn't realize the cards in the newer/recent laptops are so much more future proof. I'll definitely keep it in mind when I contemplate laptops in the future. But agreed, that having a minimum level of dedicated graphics has been a norm for me for a long time (around the P4 era). I just never bothered with a "better card upgrade" if two laptops were super similar. By the time the better card shone vs the crappier card, it was time for a new laptop.
I do generally tell people not to buy laptops with integrated cards.
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I'm definitely aware of integrated (ie. part of the CPU) versus dedicated cards. I was referring to a dedicated video card soldered to the motherboard, so it cannot be swapped. This is a trend that has been happening for some time, as it allows them to make the laptop smaller.
My wife's current laptop has a dedicated GeForce GT 435M card, but has a i7 quad 2.3 GHz processor which still runs pretty good. It just sucks that the graphics card now holds the rest of it back, because it's actually a nice laptop with some features that are hard to find today, like nice speakers that point up!
Upgrading the RAM a couple years ago from 4 GB to 8 GB gave it some extra life, and I pondered swapping the HDD with a SSD, but at this point, I can't get much more out of it.