Laptop advice - graphics

[Deetee]

I'm looking for a small laptop, but with decent graphics, and am confused by all the specs given out by the different manufacturers. I need something that is reasonable for doing some video-editing work, and also standard type gaming. I appreciate it will be onboard/integrated graphics that is available. I was lead to believe at least 128Mb equivalent graphics memory was what I needed (have I got this correct?)


So how do I assess these examples (from PC World)?
Advent 8212 - "DX10 Shared UMA Graphics"
But what about the 9112? (- it doesn't give any detailed info)
And this Philips - what is it's graphics spec?


However, these laptops do give some info in terms I understand:
Toshiba U300-13u -"Graphics Card TypeINTEL GMA X3100: To enable images to be displayed on your monitor
Graphics Memory358 MB: The higher the memory the better quality images you are display"


This Packard Bell("Graphics Card Typei945GM SHARED")seems to suggest it has "up to 256 Mb" graphics memory.

Is it safe to assume that any machines in this sort of price range with a core 2 duo processor and 1+Mb memory will be of sufficiently high graphics specification for my needs?
Thanks for any advice/tips
Deetee

 

[BigAl]

IMO, unless you are either (a) buying a machine with Vista, (b) playing fancy PC games, or (c) planning to use Photoshop or some other huge application, every PC with 500MB or more is fine.

Video memory (RAM) is either shared or non-shared. For the former, the RAM is subtracted from the main memory. This used to be a small performance hit but with today's Gigabyte of RAM, you'll never notice it.

Vista changes everything, for the worse, IMO, and if you want it's full capability, you need a laptop that does 3D video well. There are 6 versions of Vista with increasingly higher performance requirements. IMO, you should buy a machine that comes with XP.

PC magazine has good reviews and there should be an article that will step you through the issues for Vista and comment on the screens of specific laptop models.
http://www.pcmag.com/
http://www.pcmag.com/category2/0,2705,9,00.asp

 

[Deetee]

Thanks - I'll check the reviews out

 

[abkaiser]

Just writing to support the Vista point - A PC (desktop or laptop, actually) that runs lightning fast on Windows XP could easily be noticeably slowed by Windows Vista.

Either buy a brand-new PC with whiz-bang stats and Vista, or get Windows XP on it if you're getting a slower or used PC.

 

[PixyMisa]

Depends on what you mean by "standard type gaming". Any major game less than about five years old is going to run like a cow on integrated graphics. If you're thinking about card games and stuff like that, though, no problem.

With integrated graphics on notebooks, typically they take a certain percentage of your memory, rounded off to an appropriate point. So if you have 1GB of memory, it will probably reserve 128MB for graphics, which should be fine for most things. Memory is really cheap right now too, so if you need to add more it shouldn't be a problem.

 

[jeremyp]

Is it safe to assume that any machines in this sort of price range with a core 2 duo processor and 1+Mb memory will be of sufficiently high graphics specification for my needs?
Thanks for any advice/tips
Deetee

No.

For a start, you are going to want 1+Gb.

If you want to do half way serious gaming, or even video editing (maybe - I'm guessing that it's quite video intensive), you are going to want a laptop with a proper graphics card, not one that steal RAM from the computer. Of course, you'll have to pay for the extra performance.

Apart from that, my advice is to stuff it full of as much RAM as it'll take.