Onboard graphics... actually don't suck!

Well I finished putting together the core 2 Duo system for my gf at the weekend - we're waiting on the graphics card, so at the moment it's stuck with the Intel GMA950 that's built into the ASRock conroe 945G DVI motherboard.

I was highly sceptical that it could actually play *anything* other than DVDs, but she wanted to try some of her games anyway. The result was surprising to say the least.

NFSU2 works fantastically - running at 1280x1024 we can have the details a good way up - reflections actually look better than the 6800gt!

Dungeon Siege works at full details (though it dynamically scales objects so we can't always be sure how much it's working the card).

Morrowind has some texture flicker and doesn't give shiney water, but the view distance can be pushed right out and the frame-rate's incredible.

Warcraft 3 is perhaps predictably super smooth.

So really, it looks like a last generation integrated chip plays last generation driving and RPGs just fine - she doesn't have any FPS games to try unfortunately :p

But anyway - if you're building a system for someone who wants to do the odd bit of gaming on slightly older games, I highly recommend a cheap motherboard with onboard graphics! I never thought I'd say that!

MY laptop came with that, I was sure it wouldnt do anything but I was able to run vice city and stuff like that fine at fairly high settings. I think with dual core it may be that the graphics can use 1 core whilst the game uses the other.

Wow, im using an ancient card at the moment and onboard would just be worse.
NFSU2 on good settings thats mad.

Actually very surprising... I'm in the market for a Core 2 Duo laptop atm, and I was avoiding integrated graphics like the plague!

Thanks for posting, because I'm actually gonna bother reading some reviews and stuff to see if paying extra for a discrete card is actually justified.

Cheers,

Suman

Well the reviews mostly disagree with me, so I don't know if they've mostly been using older systems or something.

Best thing is to get as good an integrated chip as you can (I certainly wouldn't recommend anything slower than the gma950) and then just try the games you're interested in - you can always buy a cheap card to add in later. But you may not need to.

The GMA950's is pretty good for onboard graphics. It can run Windows Vista with full Aero mode. Also Mac OS X runs nicely with it.

You can run dual display using the ADD2 add on card which goes in the PCI-E slot. I think you get one with the conroe945G board.