Thinkpads Forum

I know integrated graphics systems share the ram and therefore memory bus with the rest of the system, but anyone have an idea how much this reduces the performance of the rest of the system?

I don't need a powerful graphics engine, but I want a snappy system for what I do, and I typically have a large number of browser windows open (e.g. 15-20), sometimes with embedded flash or pdfs, and ms word etc. open, and I'm not satisfied with the performance I'm getting right now. Plus there are always times when I'm installing things, etc. and having a slow system (I'm used to desktops I guess...) is a problem.

How much of a difference does discreet graphics make in the other-than-strictly-graphics departments? What kind of data is it transferring over the bus?

unless you are a gamer there is nothing to worry about. thanks to integrated graphics you will not have as much heat produced and your computer will run much cooler.

the biggest thing you should be worried about is the amount of memory you have and then to sorta fairly compare you need a 7200RPM drive. The 5400RPM drives in your system can't compare to the 7200RPM 16MB cache you're used to. Get the new Hitachi 7k200 and you'll be happy and then slap 3GB of RAM in your system and you're all good to go.

(oh and get some browser with TAB support, 20 Tabs uses less RAM then 15 different windows.

What OS are you wanting to run.? If it's vista get all the graphics you can afford.

I'm using windows xp. Yeah about the tabs, that's what I meant, I use Mozilla.

I was hoping for some numbers, though... which can be calculated easily enough if I knew how much data is being transferred over the bus, right?

Hm, well we can do an approximation here,

I have a wsxga+ monitor and an xga monitor, so with 4 bytes per pixel and 2568864 pixels and a refresh rate of 60 hz (or is it slower than that?), that's 616527360 bytes/sec transfered over the bus. 0.6GB, and the ram's peak transfer speed is only 5.3 GB/s (http://www.answers.com/topic/ddr2-sdram).

That's a serious performance hit, and I'm planning on upgrading to uxga on the native screen. That's not even taking into account the use of the CPU here, either. I'm not sure if that 60 hz figure should be there, though.

So is that 60 hz figure appropriate?? Anyone? What's the memory used for ?