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Hi all. I'm putting a cheap machine together for a friend of mine. Normally that leads you down the onboard VGA.
What I was considering is as far as I'm aware onboard VGA emulates (as it were) a GPU by taking resources from the RAM and CPU.
That being the case, would it be considered better to buy a seperate GPU, even one as cheap as the ATI Wildcat-10-M02 which is £9 at scan!
Cheers very much
Ash
What are your uses, and what onboard video were you looking at? Some of the AMD chipsets are really good, perfect for general desktop use, light gaming and HD video playback.
Email, Internet, notepad, youtube, DVD.
Nothing heavy. Very possibly some online flash animations.
I've not got that far yet, I have never ever even considered a board with VGA and know nothing about them so I'll have to put some research in before choosing first.
With the card at <£10 though in my head it's a no brainer but I thought I'd ask you fine chaps first.
While they do take RAM you can choose how much they take.. from as little as 32mb usually. If it's something like AMD's 780G chipset then just go for onboard as you will get everything you need from it.
Something like an ATi HD4350 would do nicely but honestly you're just using more power for little or no benefit.
Super, thanks for the advice.Quote:
Originally Posted by staffsMike
It will have 4g of memory anyway so it wont notice the loss. It's overkill I know but £32 for 4g 800mhz Corsair XMS2 is just too cheap to argue with.
The integrated graphics card are graphics cards stuck on the motherboard.They generally use the system RAM although some themselves have their own RAM. There is no emulation going here!!Quote:
Originally Posted by AshMcD
If anything these graphics cards usually have hardware to offload the playback of HD media from the CPU.
An example is the AMD 780G which has HD3450 graphics core on the motherboard and shares the system RAM. The 790GX has the same graphics core as the 780G but clocked higher and with its own DDR2 or DDR3 RAM.
Actually the description is wrong as the card is an HD2350. This is an HD2400 with 32bit RAM and no UVD. This means that it cannot accelerate HD media playback.Quote:
Originally Posted by AshMcD
To answer the actual question, generally the cheapest last generation graphics card will be better than the latest onboard graphics. So, a Radeon 3400 series card will be better than onboard graphics. *But*, with the AMD 780G /790GX and NVidia 8000 / 9000 series chipsets, the difference is a lot smaller than it used to be. Certainly if there are going to be no games played then it is a no-brainer: the onboard graphics will more than suffice. Even the older AMD 690G chipset will do the job.
When I started building computers it was possible to buy some really cheap motherboards without graphics, and integrated graphics were still really bad, so it was often the same price for a cheap board and discreet graphics card as for an integrated board with worse graphics. Nowadays, though, the cheapest motherboards have reasonable integrated graphics, so buying a board + discreet card will always be more expensive.
In other words, invest about £50 in a motherboard with onboard ATI or NVidia grpahics, and you'll be fine :)
There has been a lot said about ATI above but you should definitely look at the nvidia integrated graphics 8200/8300 GPU based motherboards.Quote:
Originally Posted by scaryjim
Note sometimes the cheapest G31 board plus a cheap dedicated graphics can be cheaper than these integrated solutions. Also remember if the motherboard goes it takes the graphics core with it although less of a problem if the graphics core goes you can plug in a dedicated card.
Good luck