ati X1400

[skitty4gzus]

is the ati x1400 card in the new T60's basically useless for gaming or not? Is is even comparable to the fire gl t2 card i have in my t42p right now? I believe this card is integrated graphics right? and if so is there really a night and day difference between the x1400 and the V520 card in the t60p? a lil help here with cards and the differences between integrated and dedicated would be nice.

[ryengineer]

Well, all cards you mentioned are discrete.

I think this thread will help you in your decision making process.

As far as the difference between integrated and dedicated gpu is concerned, this might help:

INTEGRATED VS. DEDICATED

There are essentially two different types of graphics processors that can be found in computers in general: integrated and dedicated.

Integrated graphics parts are a part of the motherboard, of the system itself. Motherboards have at least one core chip called a Northbridge, which controls functions like RAM, the PCI Express bus, and how the rest of the computer interfaces with the processor (I'm sure the diehards will probably correct me somewhere, but remember I'm just trying to make this extremely esoteric information palatable.) Integrated graphics have the graphics core built into the northbridge, and they share their video memory off of your RAM. As a result, they eat a little bit of the bandwidth your system is using to interface with the RAM, and reduce the amount of system RAM available. Most integrated parts tend to share that memory dynamically, though, meaning they only take what they need. Only the Radeon Xpress integrated parts have their own memory, and only in AMD systems. I'll talk more about them later.

Despite the shared memory, there are many benefits to integrated parts. They improve battery life, reduce the cost of the notebook, and allow the notebook to run cooler as it doesn't need to cool an extra dedicated chip.

The flipside is that they generally offer very poor performance for gaming, with the fastest integrated parts still being beaten handily by the slowest dedicated parts.

And speaking of dedicated parts: a dedicated graphics core is separate from the northbridge, and has its own video memory. This means it doesn't siphon off the system RAM, although some parts (typically lower end) do dynamically share from system RAM as needed, though only when it would improve performance (and you'll never see them do so in regular Windows operation, only during gaming).

Dedicated graphics parts will always outperform integrated parts, albeit in varying degrees. If you're going to game on your system, you'll need one of these.

The problem with dedicated parts is that they drive up the cost of the notebook, can increase the temperature (as they need to be cooled by themselves), and reduce the battery life. Additionally, due to the power draw and cooling issues, dedicated parts seldom find themselves in ultraportable notebooks.

For the full guide, visit this.

[tebore]

The X1400 is a 4 pipeline 2 vertex shader card. The V5200/V5250(X1600/X1700) is a 12pipeline 5 vertex shader card. If they ran at the same speeds the V5200 is almost 2.5x faster.

The X1600 has a few more optimizations as well.

The speeds comes parallel and linear to the power consumed. The V5200 is very power hungry and needs the 9 cell keep the machine mobile.

[jjesusfreak01]

The x1400 is not useless for gaming at all. I run BF2 on my T60, and at acceptable detail settings. I also run a couple of other games on it.

[Pascal_TTH]

X1400 is a bit faster then X1300 witch performer lower then FireGL T2 128 Mo. For any one who buys a T60 and wants to play games, Radeon X1400 is a basic requirement.

[skitty4gzus]

thanks, im just trying to do some homework here and decide if a t60 is fine, or a t60p, or if a t61 is the best bet. I want a good mix of all the components available. Widescreen, WWAN, GPU, screen brightness, structural integrity, good battery performance, and so on. The t61p looks to be a bit too uch for me but a t61 is kinda looking to be what i want to be in.