T42 Graphics

[think9]

In the product specs. it has a line "Video on Planar, Yes". Can someone tell me what that is?

TIA

[BillMorrow]

In the product specs. it has a line "Video on Planar, Yes". Can someone tell me what that is?

TIA

planar = system board

what it means is that the video chip is mounted on the system board..
soldered on..

[egibbs]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall that Video on Planar generally implies a low end video system, possibly with shared Vide/System RAM.

Ed Gibbs

[hurog]

Ed:
That's true in the desktop world. Most of your department-store computers are using a video system integrated into the motherboard for cost savings. However, there's nothing inherently inferior in building the video circuitry into the motherboard. In a desktop, it's done to save cost and minimize assembly time, but on a laptop it's done to save space.

I am amazed at how thin the T-series is -- there's no space for large daughter-cards to be added to a backplane slot. They're barely able to cram the networking card in as a daughterboard. So, the graphics chips are integrated. IBM uses pretty good stuff, and have selected high performance/low power consumption chips with appropriate amounts of memory for the display they power, at least for business use.

Gamers and graphics professionals suffer a little because the even the high-end chipsets used by IBM aren't the latest and greatest graphics engines out there, but if you need that much eye candy, you might consider one of the larger gamers laptops that DO accomodate a full-size graphics card. Naturally, your battery life will be measured in seconds, and the heat output will be correspondingly high!

In short, it's all about trade-offs: small size vs. upgradability, low power consumption vs. high performance.