Thinkpads Forum

Obviously the 140M comes at the cost of reliability; Does it actually outdo the V5250?

I'm going to say that it depends on what one is intent on doing with it. Both of these GPUs are dinosaurs, but I'd maintain that NVS140M has aged better than the V5250.

My $0.02 only...

Thanks, that's what I was looking for.

I'd say yes. The NVS 140M is based on the GeForce 8400M, which makes it a very potent GPU even today. The older ATI chips receive less support and fall out of date much more rapidly than legacy GeForce chips, even the 6000-series GeForce supports Aero and Shader 3.0, allowing many different games to work on it even today. It's also far more efficient, and if you get an NVS 140M that wasn't hit by the NVIDIA 2007-2008 chip crisis, they handle heat far better than ATI chips.

8400M wasn't a potent GPU when even on the day when it was released, so I wouldn't exactly call it potent now.

Raw-performance-wise, the V5250 is more powerful than the 140M, at least if you judge by their contemporary benchmarks and common knowledge.

With that said, they are both ancient, and won't cut it for any serious 3D work. However, the 8400M may support more hardware acceleration of video content, which may give it an edge in certain situations. It also supports DX10 and shader model 4, versus DX9 and shader model 3 for the V5250.

And finally, it is more efficient in terms of power consumption and heat, as Medessec mentioned.